Present and future of renewable energy communities

The second Regional Seminar of the Leeway Project was organized by the Region at the Rimini exhibition "Key energy 2024".

The purpose of the event was to discuss the state of the art of renewable energy communities in Italy following the publication of the highly anticipated decrees promised by the legislative decree 199 of 2021. In fact, at the beginning of this year the Government has finally published the rules necessary to complete the national regulatory framework and the GSE (the national Energy Services Manager) has subsequently published the technical rules necessary for its implementation.

Therefore, during the event, the GSE was invited to describe these technical rules, their application and the critical issues connected to them. These issues were particularly interesting for the stakeholders involved, who were in fact very numerous and actively participated in the intervention with questions and clarifications.

The Region realized a speech dedicated to illustrating the state of the art of the RECs in Emilia-Romagna and the main support measures implemented in recent months. Eng. Romano anticipated the upcoming opening of the regional tender for the financing of investments for the purchase and installation of renewable energy production and storage systems.

The following speech was carried out by Eng. Ricci of ENEA, who illustrated the methods of distributing the incentive within a REC and analysed a very clear and useful case study to explain the functioning of RECs.

Subsequently, Eng. Tommasini of the Region explained the characteristics of the pilot project that the Region is carrying out in the regional buildings of the Fiera District, focusing on the advantages and disadvantages of the different energy self-consumption configurations envisaged by the CACER decree.

Following this, Giada Spadoni, representing Sipro (Lead partner of the Leeway project) illustrated the characteristics of the European project in which the Emilia-Romagna Region is also involved, describing the European approaches to RECs policies. At the end of the speech, the participants watched the video realized during the study visit held in Bologna at the end of November.

The second part of the event finally consisted of a round table between the different actors of the regional system around the energy communities. Various stakeholders were illustrated the opportunities of RECs and their limits: in particular, representatives of the world of infrastructures (ENEL), local authorities (ANCI-ER), SMEs and multiutilities (Confservizi) and cooperation (Legacoop) talked about their experience.