The 2018/2001/EU renewable energy directive (RED II) underlined the strategic role of energy communities in the EU transition process towards sustainable and renewable energy. In line with the path traced by RED II, this paper proposes a solution that may help local energy communities in increasing self-consumption. The proposed solution is based on the combination of smart metering and smart charging. A set of smart meters returns the profile of each member of the community with a time resolution of 5 s; the aggregator calculates the community profile and regulates the charging of electric vehicles accordingly. An experimental test is performed on a local community composed of four users, where the first is a consumer with a Nissan Leaf, whereas the remaining three users are prosumers with a photovoltaic generator mounted on the roof of their home. The results of the experimental test show the feasibility of the proposed solution and demonstrate its effectiveness in increasing self-consumption. The paper also calculates the subsidy that the community under investigation would receive if the current Italian incentive policies for renewables were extended to local energy communities; this subsidy is discussed in comparison with the subsidies that the three prosumers individually receive thanks to the net metering mechanism. This paper ends with an economic analysis and calculation of savings on bills when the four users create the local energy community and adopt the proposed combination of smart metering and smart charging.

It is known that the energy transition can be achieved not only with the use of renewable energy sources but also with a new conception and management of the electricity system. Renewable energy communities are then introduced as organizations for maximizing the self-consumption of energy produced from renewable energy sources. To ensure that these energy communities can operate, there is a need for enabling technologies that allow for monitoring, data and algorithms processing as well as the enabling of the same algorithms. There exists a huge confusion in the actual technologies useful to implement the energy communities. This paper first describes and groups the main enabling technologies, analyzing the services that can be offered. The scope is to emphasize the importance of having accurate, efficient and effective technologies that allow the implementation of such communities, underlining how such technologies interact with each other. Using such technologies is important to observing the possible technical and energetic results; indeed, use cases concerning the use of these enabling technologies are proposed and analyzed, showing their operating and their good environmental and energy impact.

As subsidised feed-in-tariffs for distributed photovoltaic generation are reduced or abolished in many jurisdictions, there is growing interest in increasing self-consumption to realise greater value from rooftop PV generation. This paper proposes a blockchain based incentive mechanism for nonsumer communities with a centralized aggregator approach with the objective of increasing collective self-consumption and reduce peak demand. The incentive is implemented on a permissioned blockchain infrastructure, where generations and consumptions values are stored to the immutable ledger and smart contracts are used to implement the rewards calculation. In order to illustrate the developed incentive, the paper applies the method to four dwellings located in the south of Italy.

Utilities are increasingly interested in integrating energy efficiency and demand response measures as a strategic approach that aims to achieve an increasingly reliable, dynamic, and integrated electric system. The concepts of energy efficiency (EE), demand response (DR), and system reliability (ESR) have been mainly studied from a different perspective, dealing only with the interaction between EE and DR and between EE and ESR. This paper aims to improve knowledge and demonstrate the validity of EE interventions (EEIs) through the use of a tool for evaluating the benefits of energy efficiency measures (EEMs) in the environmental sphere and in terms of DR and ESR. In order to evaluate this interaction, a quantitative method is proposed and validated on real results in an Italian case scenario, taking into account the analysis of smart meters data for residential users located in southern Italy in Calabria. Based on the collected data, an aggregation of users was evaluated with real hourly profiles covering the period from January 2020 to August 2020. These results show how efficient energy use may affect DR resource availability and power systems reliability. In conclusion, the authors justify that a more reliable electric system is ready for new types of EE financing systems based on pay-for-performance contracts.

The pandemic event resulting from the spread of the SARS Cov 2 virus has had a deep impact on social system, establishing the conditions for the greatest economic and social crisis of the last century. This crisis necessarily and forcibly led to a radical change in lifestyles and consumption, including energy consumption, which, while having dramatic consequences from an economic point of view, clearly showed potential paths to achieving the desired ecological transition. The following work, through the analysis of data on the impact that the various lockdowns - particularly the first one- have had on the Italian energy system, aims to define possible prospects for recovery through the redefinition of the energy system from a collective and local perspective. Starting from a secondary data analysis and from the ComESto project, we aim to set up a critical analysis of the process of building Renewable Energy Communities and of the socio technical complexity to be addressed in the definition of it.

In the context of Smart Communities microgrids, the paper proposes a control approach for the power management among several DC microgrids, called by the authors Smart User Networks, aggregated in a Virtual Energy District. More specifically, the DC bus signaling control strategy is proposed as control approach for the power management of a single smart user network and for several smart user networks aggregated in a Virtual Energy District. The objective is to meet the power profile requirements sent by a supervision entity of the Virtual Energy District, named City Energy Provider. The principal characteristic of the proposed control approach is that the DC bus voltage of each Smart User Network is the only information carrier implementing the control strategy in a decentralized and distributed manner. In this way, also in case of absence of communication link among the components of a Smart User Network, a stable and continuous operating is guaranteed. Ansys Simplorer simulation results demonstrate the performance and the effectiveness of the proposed power management and control strategy.