Speaker
Description
The transition towards renewable energy is an urgent matter. Heating and cooling of buildings contributes substantially to the emission of greenhouse gasses today. Geothermal energy provides a way to change that. Utilizing the geological layers of the underground, either near the surface or deep into the ground, the underground acts a huge thermal battery that provides a balance between heating and cooling. Renewable Energy Communities is a new instrument of the society, based on sharing energy and social responsibility, that pairs well with geothermal district heating networks, regardless of the type of technology used and the fraction of renewable energy used.
In fact, after the release of the EU directive REDII and IEM, Renewable Energy Communities have been rapidly gaining relevance in the public discussion and policy agendas. Although they clearly have a great potential to foster the energy transition both in terms of societal engagement and RES technologies diffusion, their current unique/main focus is on electricity while the heating/cooling is almost completely ignored by the regulatory provision as well as by the practical implementation. Photovoltaic is and easy to install way to develop such Communities, but other renewables can also contribute to this purpose. Geothermal energy both for power but especially for heat gives ready to use technologies to be integrated with traditional and innovative solution for enhancing power production and to store energy peaks transforming power to heat thought efficient heat pumps or using underground as heat storage.
Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) are open, voluntary, and non-commercial entities that produce, share, and consume renewable energy. Basically, they are associations of local citizens, small and medium enterprises, public administrations, territorial government agencies, etc. (Soeiro et Dias, 2020; Campos, 2020). Energy communities require some of their members to produce more electricity than needed (prosumers) and some others to consume more than produced (consumers).
This allows the community to optimize the use of energy within the community itself and to avoid drawing electricity from the grid. RECs are designed to receive an economic incentive for each MWh of energy shared within the community thus, the greater the amount of energy shared and the higher the economic incentive received.
