Renewable Energy Communities: An Urban Capability-Based Approach to Evaluate Differential Participation in Cities

Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) are deemed to be capable of providing several benefits to their members, as well as to the area in where such associations operate. In this sense they could be considered as capable of expanding the Capability set of the inhabitants of a city to improve their individual and collective well-being. In this contribution, the Urban Capability approach is applied to the EU-introduced concept of RECs to evaluate the preference of different socio-demographic groups in translating RECs from capabilities to functionings. The proposed methodology aims to learn the preference model of individuals depending on their socio-demographic characteristics and geographical location, and to determine the correspondence between preference towards the performance of possible alternative RECs configurations across the city, and the performance thresholds set by inhabitants towards participation. The contribution also presents the questionnaire designed to operationalize the methodology and collect the necessary structured data to build a Machine Learning model able to learn individual preferences. Such structured data will also be used to enrich statistical data from census surveys to “spatialize” preferences related to socio-demographic characteristics of the population. Such types of data could have implications for policy makers in terms of allocation of resources and the evaluation of different levers to better support a wider and fairer participation of inhabitants to energy transition, while, at the same time, removing the barriers to achieve higher level of individual and collective well-being.