Enabling Technologies for Energy Communities: Some Experimental Use Cases

Abstract

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.

Keywords

• enabling technologies
• energy community
• smart meter
• nanogrid
• platform
• power cloud