The Italian road to energy communities

​​​​The city of Milan aims to create more or less extensive energy communities in small places: small municipalities with 3 000 inhabitants or homogeneous neighbourhoods of larger municipalities.
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An energy community is not the mere sharing of a small renewable energy production system distributed among the various parties that are part of it, but an integrated model that is based on the following basic elements:

• A community that embraces all the subjects present in the area: public buildings, schools, condominiums and private homes, businesses, industries and the waste management system;
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• The organisation of a homogeneous energy efficiency plan; the first source of green energy is saving energy and fighting waste, therefore buildings, light mobility and methods of disposal and recycling are aspects that must be examined as a whole;
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• The production of electricity from renewable sources (in the testing area we think of photovoltaics and biogas), which must be planned and distributed to keep the demand absorption capacity constant by adopting the best available technology, including storage systems;
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• The Smart Grid, which must not only govern the small individual energy production plants but must also involve the management of the gas and water networks and the waste system, in order to provide an additional, more efficient power and saving process;
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The creation of a management platform that detects production, consumption, savings, anomalies and profiles in real time, allowing the planning of an incentive policy for virtuous behaviour, also favouring from an economic and financial point of view the creation of reserves to be invested in the medium term.