The italian energy communities: an instrument against energy poverty

Renewable energy communities as means for Alleviating Energy Poverty in Italy

This workshop intends to initiate a debate around the benefits of implementing renewable energy communities (rec), both as means for aiming at the sustainable energy transition, and for alleviating the energy poverty in Italy. The discussion will explore the energy community’s governance models under a legal profile, taking into account the recent Italian regulations which have recognized the legal value of energy communities, and the opportunities emerging from their implementation, making new tools and incentives available for the dissemination of these models of collective energy self-production and self-consumption.

Renewable Energy Communities could play a fundamental role in creating sustainable community models and become one of the key tools for abandoning the policy of subsidies and bonuses for families in poverty, instead taking on the "responsibility" of promoting the energy efficiency of buildings and of homes as well as promoting training and awareness-raising interventions for a more conscious and effective use of energy. Renewable Energy Communities can also play a leading role in the wider context of the ecological transition. However, future initiatives will have to develop solutions capable of creating synergy between climatic, social, political, and economic aspects to favor the change of models not only of energy consumption but also of production.

In Italy, the numbers of the current communities are very low and are mostly configured as experimental situations. But in the next 10 years, a scenario of between 25,000 and 100,000 energy communities is conceivable, which would produce a market estimated between 50 and 160 billion euros.

It is therefore worth discovering what they made for and what they need to evolve in the near future.