Energy Community, virtuous users receive token-grants to buy services

Smart community. Where participants produce, consume and share renewable energy. And safely exchange goods and services. All thanks to digitalisation and to the benefit of quality of life and sustainability, with economic and social benefits. This is the philosophy behind Italy's first 'Smart Community' starting up in the municipality of Anguillara Sabazia, in the province of Rome, near Lake Bracciano.

"The flywheel of this Smart Community is the energy community,' says Stefano Pizzuti, head of ENEA's Critical Infrastructure and Energy Community tools and services division. 'It starts with the energy virtuosity of the community members, to trigger other actions as well.

The energy community 'thanks to this virtuosity has profits, earnings that it invests in social activities and mainly in the collective and not individual interest'.

Then there is a second aspect, and it is related to digitisation, which concerns energy information, data access and consumption reduction. "Energy awareness is worth about 10 per cent," the researcher argues, "then there are a number of other values calculated through algorithms. Such as, for example, energy consumption during peak production hours. "This energy virtuosity produces a virtual currency called a token that can be used within the Community marketplace," the researcher continues, "the space where people exchange goods and services of all kinds. Now community members are starting to add services". An example? "Someone who has bicycles could make them available for a token per hour of use". 

A revolution that, as the researcher points out, also affects consumption. "This mechanism is reversing the habits we have," he continues, "and if we do not consume, what happens in Spain and Portugal happens. For Claudia Meloni, a researcher at ENEA's Tools and Services for Critical Infrastructures and Energy Communities Division and head of the 'Technologies for the efficient penetration of the electric vector in end uses' project, the entire system 'represents a real booster for its diffusion from the local reality to the urban system, also favouring social cohesion and the active participation of all citizens in the achievement of the energy transition objectives'.