On April 20, 2024, Italy celebrates the first edition of Green Energy Day, a day dedicated to Energy Transition, during which renewable energy facilities open their doors to the public with the aim of raising awareness and educating the community on the importance of environmental and sustainability issues.
With the occasion, we delve into a hot topic of recent months, namely Energy Communities (CERs) and possible Configurations of Self-Consumption for Renewable Energy Sharing (CACER), taking a closer look at their opportunities for participation and benefits for businesses.
We have already addressed the topic of Renewable Energy Communities on our platforms, explaining what they are and what the recent CACER Decree of the MASE in terms of incentives for widespread self-consumption.
As of today, two important updates are emerging that require attention: the publication of operating rules for accessing incentives and the availability of the Energy Services Manager (GSE) Portal for submitting applications.
CACER and members: incentives and roles
There are three Configurations for Widespread Self-Consumption that are eligible for the Decree’s incentives:
- ERCs: legal entities formed by sets of citizens, for example SMEs and Entities, connected to the same primary cabin, sharing energy generated by facilities available to the ERC members themselves;
- collective self-consumption groups: sets of at least two self-consumers acting collectively who are holders of separate connection points, but located in the same building or condominium;
- individual remote self-consumers: systems composed of an individual end-customer who virtually self-consumes energy produced by plants located in areas under his or her own availability, but connected to a different connection point (POD) than the point of consumption, while remaining under the same primary substation.
As stipulated in the Decree and the operating rules, members of a CACER can take on three different roles:
- end customer: the person who takes electricity from the grid and has the ability to virtually self-consume the energy generated by producers or prosumers connected to the ERC;
- prosumer: the end customer, who simultaneously produces electricity intended both for their own consumption and for feeding into the grid for sharing;
- producer: the entity that has the renewable energy production facility and makes all or part of the energy produced available to CACER. The producer need not be a member of the CACER, but can also be a third-party producer.
How the mechanism of self-consumed shared energy works
In a Self-Consumption Configuration situation, the producer directly consumes the energy produced by its own plant, thus becoming a prosumer, but simultaneously shares the remaining energy with the national grid to which other CACER users will also be connected.
It will be called virtual self-consumption when in the same time slot producers and consumers are respectively and simultaneously releasing energy to the grid and consuming.
Subsidies for widespread self-consumption
The economic contributions under the CACER Decree are:
- valuation fee for self-consumed energy: for 2024 it will be 10.57 euros per MWh of shared energy;
- shared energy premium tariff: this is an incentive from the GSE with a 20-year term starting from the commissioning of the plant. The amount of the tariff will depend on a fixed part, linked to the power of the plant, and a variable part, linked to the market price of energy. In addition, only in the case of photovoltaics, there is a premium for plants located in central and northern regions, since they are penalized by lower irradiation. The premium tariff represents the largest part of the subsidy and may range between 6 and 13 cents per kWh of energy;
