Digital Platforms for Renewable Energy Communities Projects: An Overview

In 2019 the European Commission completed the approval process of the “Clean Energy for All Europeans” package, a framework of eight among regulations and directives, aiming at reshaping the European energy policy [1]. The goal of this reform is to deliver on the EU’s Paris Agreement commitments for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and moving toward cleaner European energy system. The Renewable Energy Directive Recast (RED II) [2], one of the eight legal files, introduces the Renewable Energy Community (REC) as a new paradigm to empower citizens by giving them an active role in the energy transition.

The renewable energy community has been designed to support the deployment of renewable energy sources for energy production, including electricity, and to foster the acceptance of renewables among European citizens. RECs allow citizens to organize energy projects collectively, pool individual investments, and become active users of the energy market [3].

The transposition of the RED II i” to m’mber state laws and regulations is ongoing. Some EU countries such as Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Greece, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, and Sweden have already implemented fully or partially the RED II directive [4].

Among the energy policy frameworks formulated to support the development of REC projects, the “virtual meterin” is becoming the most implemented energy policy among EU countries, rather than the peer-to-peer framework that has been the main framework of the smart grid research. The “virtual meterin” policy considers different membe’s points-of-delivery (POD) of an REC as part of the same “virtua” POD, even if the members are physically connected on different points of the distribution grid [5]. Therefore, the amount of energy the REC exchange with the grid is the net energy flux of different POD of demand and production (i.e. PV or WIND generation), called “shared energy”. Recently Minuto et al. [6], reviewed the support schemes for REC projects put in place by the EU pioneer countries, such as Belgium, Germany, Greece, Italy, Ireland, Portugal and Spain. The energy components incentivized by different mechanisms are: the shared energy, the energy fed into grid, and the reduction of network charges on the shared energy. The most commonly used incentives mechanism are [6, 8]: The virtual net-metering (Belgium, Grece, Portugal, Spain) or the virtual self-consumption (Germany, Italy) on the shared energy quota; the feed-in-tariff (Germany), net purchase and sale (Italy, Spain), feed-in-premium (Ireland) or bilateral contract (Portugal) on the energy feed in to the grid quota; the exemption (Germany, Portugal) or a rembourse (Italy) on the network charges quota.

Against this background, the lesson learned from the first renewable energy communities born in Italy from 2019 onwards [9] is that there are three typical phases for the development of a REC project: “design”, “creation”, and “operation”.

The main objective of the "design" step is to originate the REC project and develop a feasibility study [10]. In this stage are analyzed different renewable generation technologies, energy conversion and storage assets, and business models in order to find the configuration and sizes that fit the project energetic and economic goals.

Moving forward to the process of development of RECs, the main objective of the "Creation" step is to find the means, procedures and resources to implement the setup of the REC [11]. This phase is the most complex of the three because it depends strongly on the RES project business model and comprehends a sequence of interconnected and interdependent sub-steps that require many competencies to be accomplished, e.g. legal, administrative, technical, financial, and social engagement.

The main objective of the "Operation" step is to operate and maintain the Renewable Energy Community [12]. It involves day-to-day activities to monitor, organize, and optimize the resources to guarantee the design performances and meet the project's goals.

Each of the three REC project steps involves regulated activities such as law, technical rules, legal, tax, and financial aspects to be covered. Many of the tasks are highly technical and require specific professional competencies that are not common knowledge to any citizen. On the other side, some tasks require all REC members' high level of understanding and agreement. Moreover, across Europe, each country has its own set of regulations limiting the standardization and spreading of best practices of successful pioneers REC projects. The complexity of these processes might result in a barrier to the citizen’s grass-root energy community projects [13]. In this regard, digital platforms might develop transparent, automatic/semi-automatic procedures guiding and assisting the REC management through the whole project life-cycle. In this case, the objective of the digital platform is to reduce the gap between the opportunity, the creation of the EC, and the practical possibilities of an aggregate of citizens that are not energy managers or energy market experts.

On the other side, the increase in the citizens' interest and their will to participate in REC projects is raising the demand for expert help and support. For this reason, several digital supporting tools and platforms are emerging, commercial, freeware or developed by EU founded projects.

This work presents aims to identify how the digital platforms and tools available today can be used by citizens to develop REC projects, analyzing their capability of covering the different activities required in each of the three stages of REC project implementation: “design”, “creation”, and “operation”.

Figure 1 reports the total score achieved by each analyzed tool. The total score is calculated by summing the scores of the KPI in each category and normalizing it to 33,3%. Thus, a tool fulfilling all the KPIs in all development stages reaches a total coverage score of 100%.

The first insight from Figure 1 is that no tool achieves 100% score. The top scores are performed by the EU project tools, in particular the RENAISSANCE, eNeuron and CITYxChange projects. Among the commercial tools, only one achieves a score higher than 60%, while the Freeware tools lie below 30%.

Figure 2 shows a more detailed analysis of the number of tools and platforms that provide services or features compliant with the KPIs identified in each development step. The majority of the KPIs of the “design” phase are covered, especially by EU projects and Freeware tools. In fact, less than 20% of the commercial tools provide services for this development stage. Among all, the KPI 1.3, accounting for the service "Identify physical perimeter of REC project", is not covered by any tool or platform. This result might be due to the lack of public information about the distribution network. For example, in Italy, the distribution network lying below a common transformation shaft defines the REC's perimeter. The information about the network topology is possessed by the distributor system operator (DSO) and is not publicly available. The Creation step, among all, is the one where the offer of services is less covered. Only the tools and platforms developed by the EU project offer a range of options on this stage.

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Figure 1. Total score of the analyzed tools and platforms, broken down for each REC phases: “design” (light green), “creation” (green) and “operation” (dark green)

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Figure 2. Number of tools and platforms providing service compliant with each KPI

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Figure 3. Mean score in each development stage by category of tool

The “operation” step is where the majority of the tools offer services and features. Only the 3.3 KPI “User's access and control of raw energy data, notifications of target/threshold events (e.g demand response)” registered a lower offer of services by the commercial platforms. This result might be related to the commercial interest in the ownership and management of the user's energy data. Both commercial and EU project tools achieve in almost all KPIs the maximum score, while the coverage of the Freeware software for this stage is limited.

Figure 3 shows the overall coverage that each tool category has over the three stages of REC project development. Theis results show that the commercial tools are mostly focused on offering services for the “operation” stage while having limited offers of services for the “design” and “creation” stages. The Freeware software cover the “design” and “operation” stage with no support for the Creation stage; on the other hand, the EU Project tools provide a more comprehensive range of services covering all stages of REC project development. We can assert that these results depend on the financing scheme behind the development of each tool and platform. Commercial tools are typically paid to assure the optimization, management and operation of already established REC projects with a defined business model and goals. Freeware tools are mostly research-based and their development aims to provide energy scenario and develop feasibility studies. While the EU project tools are mainly developed to support demonstration project facing all stages and aspects of the REC project. On the other side, we noticed that some of the EU project tools are used for the specific project only and not publicly available, or their perimeter of competencies is limited only to those EU member states involved in the project as a demonstrator.

This work was supported by the Energy Center Lab of Politecnico di Torino.