The Renewable Energy Community (abbreviated REC) is a “local” solution to increase the production of electricity from renewable sources. Thanks to the conversion into law of the Italian Milleproroghe Decree 162/2019, CERs have also been introduced in our country, as required by the European Directive RED II (2018/2001 / EU).
What is an energy community?
Energy Community means a voluntary association between citizens, businesses, local public administrations, municipalities or districts of small and medium-sized enterprises, who decide to collaborate to equip themselves with plants for the production and self-consumption of energy from renewable sources.
In practice, the Community becomes prosumer, acronym for producer and consumer: it builds and owns a shared energy production plant – typically photovoltaic or micro-wind.
The energy produced is made available to the community at affordable prices, while the remaining portion can be fed into the network, accumulated in a special system and returned when needed, or exchanged with geographically close consumers.
What are the benefits?
Looking forward to the reduction of carbon emissions in the electricity sector expected by 2050, overshadowed by the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, and to face the energy crisis, it is estimated that 264 million citizens of the European Union will join the energy market through RECs, to generate up to 45% of the system’s overall renewable electricity.
In Italy alone, the percentage of energy produced from renewable sources is 19%, with an installed power of 60.8 GW, but the aim is to strengthen energy autonomy to reach the goal of 30% of energy produced from sources renewables envisaged by the Energia Clima 2030 plan.
Furthermore, Italy has a geographical advantage: it is made up of several thousand small municipalities, has excellent solar radiation, very ventilated areas and, in addition, has a very high availability of roofs and land necessary to install photovoltaic devices or wind turbines.
The limits that hold back Energy Communities
Until now, Italian bureaucracy has not helped the development of the Energy Communities.
However, with the energy decree of 1 March 2022, the installation of photovoltaic and thermal solar panels in buildings and structures above ground is considered ordinary, and no longer extraordinary, maintenance, drastically reducing the process. Furthermore, there are already companies that offer “keys in hand” REC plants to interested parties, with obvious advantages for all those involved.
Annalisa Galante, Scientific Coordinator of That’s Smart and consultant of MCE Lab states:
“Certainly in order to achieve the objectives set by the European development plans, but also by our National Plan for Recovery and Resilience we will have to work on innovation, integration and renewables also on the built. To do this, we could start with buildings that already group citizens who share common spaces: condominiums, which are considered “collective self-consumption”. On the basis of the redevelopments implemented by the superbonus, the next two years are the right time to act to create RECs, also because many realities are moving to encourage this new form of decentralized production, an example of which is the Alternative call for proposals from the Foundation. Cariplo or the Lombard regional law 2/2022, which allocated 22 million euros to support RECs, in particular for the purchase and installation of plants for the production of energy from renewable sources.
[…] it is certainly a process that seeing more subjects involved is not easy to implement, after which there is a lack of communication on the part of the subjects involved, starting with the public administration, which struggles to be incisive on technical projects involving groups of individual citizens; but above all the Superbonus of 110% has monopolized the attention and activities of those subjects who could be promoters of this development. We can say that among the limits of the 110% Superbonus regulations there is that of not having thought about the organic development of energy efficiency: the coat, the ventilated facade, the replacement of old plant systems and the photovoltaic panel are fine, but the development of RECs, in a more integrated program of interventions, would certainly give greater and lasting structural benefits over time. We would need a table that would see the facilitators of the energy transition operate jointly: from local public administrations (the role of mayors is fundamental), to utilities that can promote new forms of energy management, to condominium administrators as “ambassadors” of the ‘legislative information on RECs and collective self-consumption and the E.”
Help in this direction also comes from the REPowerEU plan which provides for the obligation to install photovoltaic panels on the roofs of new public, commercial and residential buildings, to obtain 600 GW of new power by 2030, at European level, for which they will be approximately 300 billion euros allocated.
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