Decarbonizing residential energy consumption under the Italian collective self-consumption regulation

The recent Italian regulatory framework is promoting Collective Self-Consumption to play a key role in the energy transition. In fact, this new scheme allows sharing and exchange of electricity produced from Renewable Energy Sources (RES) among different end-users living in the same multi-family building block. In this context, this paper aims to perform an energy, economic and environmental assessment of creating a RES-based energy community formed by end-users located in the same residential building, taking into account the currently available incentive schemes. In particular, two different progressive scenarios have been analyzed: the first one includes only a photovoltaic system to supply the aggregated electricity demand of the apartments, while a heat pump is further integrated in the second scenario for supplying and electrifying/decarbonizing also the space heating demand of the building. Available temperature and solar irradiance datasets at national level were then used to spread the analysis to the whole country, at different latitudes. Although differences exist at regional levels for the proposed scenarios, the results highlight how the RES-based Collective Self-Consumption scheme is economically profitable for Italian residential end-users with cost savings up to 32% and environmentally sustainable with carbon emissions reduction up to 60%.