Italian renewable energy communities: status and prospect development analysis

2050 Carbon emissions have become an urgent problem for all the countries across EU. Conserving renewable energy in buildings has emerged as one of the primary strategies for reducing the greenhouse gases. Developing and spread self-sufficient energy communities integrated with renewable energy source has emerged as more impacting approach for lowering the impact of the building sector. The latest Renewable Energy Directive (RED) III published in October 2023, increased European Union’s ambition for renewable energy transition. Italy keeps updating its regulations following the directive and aims to cover 55.4% of its gross final electricity consumption with renewable energy by 2030. The research aims at analyzing the policy trajectory, energy community transition status and potential challenge through policy analysis and case studies analysis. This research illustrated the process of the policy and legislation refining and regulating renewable energy communities (RECs) and compared the difference from EU to Italy. RECs database, key performance indicators configuration and data analysis were carried out to systematically conclude the REC developing status. This work presents in a unique way the state of the art of the REC, with a focus on the Italian context, and serves as a reference point that captures the current status and outlines possible future developments. Driven by incentive policies, approximately 55% of RECs in Italy are located in small municipalities with populations under 5,000. Among them, only 26.4% are project-specific RECs focused on individual buildings or energy systems. Therefore, both a general REC database and a detailed project-level database are established in this study. Through database comparison, eight key performance indicators were collected and analyzed to depict the typical RECs status in order to support policymakers and stakeholders to revise and ameliorate standards and procedures to promote and spread the transition towards renewable energy communities.