Increasing concerns over climate change and energy poverty have triggered the transition toward a decentralized energy system through the widespread adoption of renewable energy technologies. Although this transition was led, over past decades, mainly by major investors and large industrial players, citizens and local authorities are increasingly playing an active role in delivering clean energy investments. In particular, the current European Renewable Energy Directive introduced Renewable Energy Communities (RECs), which allow citizens to collectively organize their participation in the energy market, leading to a more distributed renewable energy system and new forms of sustainable, collaborative, and democratic economies. RECs currently under implementation show differences among European countries due to the different national contexts. A literature review exploring the peculiar Italian regulatory framework on RECs and its recent evolution has been carried out to identify available national and regional financial support mechanisms, barriers, and emerging trends in the diffusion of RECs across the country. The paper reviews and describes three main approaches that emerged in the development of RECs in Italy, discussing their strengths, and limitations. In addition, it provides a brief comparison of the regulatory framework in different European countries, highlighting the distinctive features of the Italian experience. Although the development of RECs in Italy involved a combination of both public and private initiatives, the leading role of local authorities as promoters and aggregators of RECs is evident. This role helps preserve the social impact of RECs but might slow down their implementation due to bureaucratic issues often linked to public procedures and procurement processes, as well as the lack of sufficient expertise within local authorities.

Cities and nations worldwide are pledging to energy and carbon neutral objectives that imply a huge contribution from buildings. High-performance targets, either zero energy or zero carbon, are typically difficult to be reached by single buildings, but groups of properly-managed buildings might reach these ambitious goals. For this purpose we need tools and experiences to model, monitor, manage and optimize buildings and their neighborhood-level systems. The paper describes the activities pursued for the deployment of an advanced energy management system for a multi-carrier energy grid of an existing neighborhood in the area of Milan. The activities included: (i) development of a detailed monitoring plan, (ii) deployment of the monitoring plan, (iii) development of a virtual model of the neighborhood and simulation of the energy performance. Comparisons against early-stage energy monitoring data proved promising and the generation system showed high efficiency (EER equal to 5.84), to be further exploited.

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The effects of climate change are already impacting people’s quality of life worldwide. Evidence highlights the urgency in action to counteract this on-going process. Europe aims at fostering the green transition becoming climate neutral by 2050. The envisioned pathway encompasses an overhaul of the energy system including an increase in renewable energy production and end-user energy efficiency. The EU further recognizes the fundamental role of citizens and communities in addressing an effective transition. Within this framework, energy communities (EC) and peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading are emerging as new opportunities for boosting green technologies in renewable energy and the smart grid sector, and for rising citizens’ awareness of the theme. However, the implementation of P2P ECs in Europe entails complex legal challenges that cannot be solved only through sector-specific regulation. This open letter critically presents the experience gained in the H2020 NRG2peers project about the knowledge advancement in the regulatory context of the project pilot sites. These are located in four EU ecosystems (from innovators to laggards) that are: the Netherlands, Spain, Slovenia, and Italy. Each EC involved in the NRG2peers project is thus facing different challenges related to its specific socio-economic condition and energy market framework. These barriers need to be overcome and new tools will be delivered during the NRG2peers project. Moving from the lessons learnt at the pilot sites, both roadmaps at the regulatory level and an advisory app are under development to support the uptake of the next generation of European peer-to-peer Energy Communities.

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