Renewable Energy Community "Energy City Hall" of the City of Magliano Alpi (Italy) (M-ECHall)

Renewable Energy Communities (REC), introduced in 2019 by the Clean Energy for all Euro peans Package, are new legal entities that promote citizens involvement in energy production and management. They are considered a key instrument in driving the energy transition at a local level, supporting the use of renewable energy and contributing to limit fuel poverty through reduced energy consumption and lower tariffs.

RECs have been introduced in the Italian regulation in 2019 as associations of citizens, small and medium-sized enterprises, and public entities who are equipped with shared assets for generation and local self-consumption of renewable energy. The RECs are based on open participation and aim to bring environmental, economic and social benefits to their members and to the area in which they operate. To support the communities, the Italian legislation en visages a contribution of 110€/MWh for the energy that is self-consumed within the REC, eval uated according to a “virtual” scheme.

The user group, i.e. the Renewable Energy Community of Magliano Alpi, is one of the first RECs created in Italy and is interested in tackling some of the most relevant technical and engineering challenges associated to operation and expansion of the RECs. In particular, the Magliano Alpi team is interested in developing new forecast models for the energy profiles of the communities that can support the planning and expansion of the RECs and provide robust quantitative information for the development of business plans. This point is particular relevant in light of the latest regulatory developments in the Italian framework, with an extension of the aggregation perimeter prescribed for the REC. Currently, all members of the same REC must be connected to the same secondary substation (LV level) wihle in the future the REC will be able to include all users connected to the same primary station (MV level).

The Magliano Alpi team has sought to be hosted in the Smart Grid Interoperability Laboratory in Ispra to take advantage of its computational hardware resources, of its proprietary demand prediction models and of the expertise of its researchers in the areas of energy forecast.

The main objective of the activity has been the modelling of RECs in order to be able to esti mate the amount of energy generated from renewable sources that is virtually shared among REC users. The developed model is capable to recreate an estimated configuration of a re newable energy community, based on real data sets of consumption and production of photo-voltaic systems. The model can also consider external data such as weather conditions, sea sons, number of active and passive domestic users, number of industrial prosumers, type of user habits, territorial extension of the CER. The configuration resulting from the model is used to determine the virtual flows of energy between the different members of the CER, allowing to determine the overall incentive paid by the Electricity Services Manager and ARERA.

The simulation of different compositions of renewable energy communities also gives the op portunity to identify the limits of installed power and contracted power for which the amount of shared energy is maximized. This limit is relevant for the territorial aggregators of users, in order to avoid oversizing of the community; this oversizing would have as an immediate effect the decrease of the incentive shared among the various members of the REC and therefore a decrease in active involvement of users in terms of modification of their consumption habits to maximize shared energy.

In general, the prediction of the energy profiles of the REC and of their associated financial incentive represents a fundamental element for analyzing the economic sustainability of cur rent and planned investments on RECs. The preliminary results and insights obtained by the user group during the visit are already very promising but further work is planned in the near future, with the development of an open-source version of the developed forecast software that includes a graphical user interface and standard functions for import of data from the main databases (e.g. ENEL). The final objective is to develop a comprehensive and easy-to-use software package that can be adopted by other practitioners and interested users of the sector.