Fully Solar Residential Energy Community: A Study on the Feasibility in the Italian Context

Expanding the installation and use of renewable energy sources will help Europe reach its energy and climate goals. Additionally, users of small-scale photovoltaic systems will be essential to the energy transition by forming renewable energy communities (RECs). This paper offers a techno-economic analysis of the Italian REC incentive system and a suitable business model to encourage residential photovoltaic and battery installations and lower electricity costs. In this paper, we present a community model that includes a set number of prosumers, a growing number of consumers, and various configurations and management strategies for photovoltaic (PV) and battery systems. Key elements of novelty include (i) the implementation of a fully-solar REC with PV and storage under the Italian incentive scheme, (ii) the introduction a of novel centralized BESS control strategy based on firm generation that maximises energy sharing while minimising its grid impact, (iii) the economic profitability analysis of the PV and storage system for consumers and prosumers when different BESS control strategies are applied. The simulation results show that energy performance increases if a centralized battery management strategy is activated and more consumers join the community. In addition, the proposed business model shows that the best profitability is achieved when there are as many consumers as prosumers. Most importantly, the approach was extended to the extreme case of a “fully solar-powered” community, demonstrating that the REC model is viable even with the current PV and battery costs. Finally, we show that fully solar-powered communities can be easily implemented where homeowners have enough surface for PV installation and purchase a central battery through crowdfunding.