Today we often talk about energy communities: self-consumption, storage, green energy production. But what does it really mean to establish an Energy Community? Activating a process of aggregation at the local level that benefits people and creates value through innovation in the way we generate, consume and manage energy.
A first concrete example is in the province of Cuneo where the country’s first Energy Community was inaugurated on March 12 in Magliano Alpi.
A public-minded REC, the Municipality has provided a photovoltaic system to share the energy produced and not self-consumed with the community.
This experience is certainly a stimulus to the activation of other RECs where citizens, public entities and small businesses can come together to form collective self-consumption groups and energy communities creating mechanisms for growth, employment and sustainable development.
Public Administration must exercise an active role in the development of innovative models for local revitalization. Its mission is to seize these opportunities, instill confidence and be a guarantee for citizens and provide the tools to make them conscious protagonists of the energy transition and participants in the environmental and economic benefits that RECs will be able to bring.
In Southeast Milano (the SEM area) this is precisely the goal, to start from the Administrations to give life to Local Energy Communities of self-consumption and make the know-how acquired available to all adhering Municipalities, progressively extending to the rest of the territory: replicability is the basis of experimentation in SEM. Green production and self-consumption are certainly key issues for decarbonization, but equally important, in our view, are the energy efficiency actions that must be preparatory to the realization of a REC: integrated energy efficiency and renewables projects as drivers of new energy communities are therefore about to be activated throughout the territory, also taking advantage of the energy upgrading measures currently available or being activated.
