On the 9th of July Piemonte Region organized the dissemination event "Energy community and storage" in cooperation with the Central Europe project STORE4HUC. The conference successfully took place in Cuneo. The event was semi virtual: 30 people participated physically while another 100 were connected via webinar.
Energy Communities (EC) and the storage systems is one of the main topics in the roadmap for the regional energy transition nowadays and the large participation to the event confirmed it. The conference was a great opportunity to present the objectives of two European projects which are focused on this issue, such as SHREC and STORE4HUC, to an interested audience. The presentations dealt with different aspects, starting from the national and regional regulatory framework about EC, which is still under development in Italy.
Various inputs regarding the different storage technologies available and their functionalities, as well as the assessment aspects and the administrative problems related to the establishment of communities were the focus of the interesting speech of Professor Tartaglia of the Polytechnic of Torino. The event ended with a roundtable among SHREC stakeholders (energy utility, national research institute and energy agency experts) about the most important enabling conditions to carry on EC initiatives in Piemonte.
The debate highlighted some key points to be considered for the Renewable Energy Communities establishment: the need to create in an innovative way synergies between different available technologies; the importance of pilot projects in order to have examples and reliable data for the future roll out of the projects; the necessity of rising awareness among citizen; the need of matching energy efficiency with the concept of EC (projects at urban scale should play a key role), of finding innovative way of financing (such as crowd finance) and, of course, of having a clear legislative framework. All these topics are fully addressed by SHREC and should be further explored during the project implementation.
