Energy Community in Action—Energy Citizenship Contract as Tool for Climate Neutrality

Abstract

Cities are responsible for 65% of energy consumption and for the 70% of CO2 emissions. Incisive actions are fundamental to bring cities towards climate neutrality by 2050 working by and for the citizens. For this reason, the “100 climate-neutral cities Mission” anticipates the target of climate neutrality by 2030. The objective of this paper, developed within the H2020 GRETA project—GReen Energy Transition Actions (GA101022317), is to investigate energy communities and climate city contracts as key interventions to face the ambitious goal of implementing citizens-centered and climate-neutral cities. To achieve this objective, this paper is structured as follows: (1) an updated framework of European and Italian legislation concerning energy communities; (2) an overview of climate city contracts’ definition and key aspects; (3) a selection and analysis of energy communities’ case studies; (4) a description of already developed pilot climate city contracts. The results provide more advanced knowledge about EU energy communities strategies and about the possible contractual agreements that can guarantee commitment between parties and can allow the active participation of citizens in the energy system. The lessons learned contribute to the application in the GRETA Italian case study, whose first participation activities are also described in the paper.

Understanding Energy Citizenship: How Cultural Capital Shapes the Energy Transition

“…Energy citizenship is an increasingly prominent concept in the literature on energy transitions, which is rapidly evolving as the energy transition continues to generate new stimuli for citizen involvement [24]. In this study, we empirically show that energy citizenship is associated with cultural capital and that the impact of cultural capital will vary according to the forms of energy citizenship that are in play.…”

“…A group of studies focus on how consumers participate in energy transition by adopting new energy-related technologies such as smart meters and electric cars [2,10] and others discuss the importance of prosumerism whereby individuals become both producers and consumers of energy [23] and by investing in smart grids enable the distribution and exchange of local energy [27,28]. More recently, citizens have built communities around the question of how energy components are sourced, and how energy waste is managed (e.g., Neessen et al, [29], Roversi et al, [24]). Furthermore, studies have expanded on the concept of energy citizenship to account for institutional innovations, legislative frameworks, variations in promotion methods, implementation and planning, transformative policy-making processes, climate transitions, and introductions of new themes such as energy democracy, justice, and sustainable development [24,[30][31][32][33][34][35].…”

A stochastic approach to dynamic participation in energy communities

“…Fair revenue sharing and exit clauses are examined in [15], to identify the optimal sizing of energy communities. [39] investigate how energy communities and climate city contracts are key interventions to face the ambitious goal of implementing citizens centered and climate-neutral cities.…”

Towards a Low Carbon Future: Evaluating Scenarios for an Energy Community Through a Multi-Objective Optimisation Approach

“…In the same line, the directive for boosting renewable energy sources [15] says that moving towards such energy sources the GHG emissions will be substantially reduced while the human health and air quality will be improved. Different studies regarding improvement of energy communities have already analysed the agreement of their results with the "Fit for 55" package [16] or, at least mentioned their awareness and importance of such piece of legislation [17,18]. From the depicted literature review, one can verify the attention that the scientific community has given to enhancing energy communities' performance.…”