Italy’s first renewable energy community, located in the municipality of Magliano Alpi, was established under Italian Law 8/2020 on Energy Communities in December 2020. The community is composed of eight stakeholders and involves, in addition to public buildings in the municipality of Magliano Alpi, some residential users and small and medium-sized enterprises, realizing public–private cooperation aimed at reducing energy dependence on the public grid and, at the same time, contributing to the decarbonization of the energy sector. This article provides an analysis of the economic and energy performance during the first year of renewable community piloting. The study analyzes data collected with the community energy management system and introduces a number of key performance indices useful for evaluating further development and optimization options.

Energy Communities (EC) are becoming a major driver to foster the energy transition in Europe and the regulatory framework adopted by each Member State (MS) plays a key role for a prosperous deployment of ECs. This paper is thus divided into two layers. The first layer of this paper addresses the current regulations introduced by MSs regarding ECs, providing a critical comparison of each solution used. The second layer of research concerns the introduction of a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) optimization algorithm early studied by some of the authors furtherly developed to assess the conditions that favour prosumers’ participation to ECs. Both these models have been tested on a case study located in the city of Magliano Alpi, in the north of Italy. The results demonstrate that the proposed methodology correctly evaluates the key parameters influencing participation of citizens in ECs and indicate that for the Italian EC under study, there is the possibility to further expand the capacity installed without undermining the profitability of investment.