Italian Pilot

Location and Specific Challenges: The demo is located in the central part of the Italian peninsula, in Abruzzo region. The site is placed in Vallevignale, a small town in the municipality of Notaresco, Teramo. An operative Renewable Energy Community (REC) in Vallevignale is fully managed by EnGreen. The REC currently involves 10 buildings: 5 of these buildings can be considered prosumers (as they produce, self-consume and share their renewable energy production) and the remaining 5 are consumers (which can use the low-cost energy produced by the other members of the REC). The demo starts from the installed capacity of 42 kW of photovoltaic and 105 kWh of lithium storage, and the already installed 7 EV charging stations. Specific Challenges: Some of the challenges are related to the local context. In Vallevignale – being a rural community – the buildings are quite dislocated and the local sense of community is quite weak. This implied a cultural constrain in the initial REC promotion. The Vallevignale case is only composed by citizens (via citizen association) and for this reason it has a high replicability potential in rural areas as an example for other citizen associations.

Existing Infrastructure: The average electricity consumption of the community before the REC settlement was around 3.600 kWh/year per user. In addition, the average gas consumption per user was 25.000 kWh/year. The entire settlement totalled 54 MWh of electricity and 37 MWh of equivalent gas consumption. Vallevignale REC has the objective to phase out natural gas, before 2024 by replacing gas boilers with heat pumps, conventional stoves with induction ones and supporting peak loads with solar water heaters. For further increasing the efficiency on demand