NEWS

Italy launches first solar energy community in social housing project

09/04/2021

Description

PV Magazine, article. ill integrate a PV installation with a storage system to power 48 households of a social housing project and a fleet of rented electric vehicles. It is a collective effort that could be replicable as soon as 2023. It is the Self-User project.

Details

A 48-apartment building in the Reggio Emilia province in northern Italy will help assess an energy community business model specifically targeting social housing. The testing phase, which should end by December 2022, will show if and how the model being implemented in the Scandiano municipality will be replicable.

'The project foresees a 60 kW PV system on the roof. Together with a 115.2 kWh storage system, it will be installed by the end of 2021,' project leader Sauro Saraceni told pv magazine. 'Next year an EV fleet will be introduced, while consumption monitoring, which began in September 2020, will continue till the end of 2022. That’s to understand eventual complexities arising on the ground,'

Saraceni, who works for ART-ER, an Emilia-Romagna consortium aiming to promote and coordinate sustainable growth of the region, said Scandiano would be an example of PV installations and mobility solutions not just in the region but in the entire country. 'Among other residential options, social housing is the one suffering the most from energy poverty,' Saraceni stressed, adding that the region aims to extend this model and promote it to other social housing projects in the coming years.

According to preliminary estimates, the PV and storage system will lead to a 60% reduction in electricity consumption.

The three institutions responsible for preliminary analysis — ART-ER, the Italian research agency ENEA and the University of Bologna — are currently modeling the consumption profiles collected by Enel X, a provider of demand response owned by Italian utility Enel. Meanwhile, ACER Reggio Emilia, the social housing company managing the apartment building, is speaking with potential partners to install a PV and storage system by the end of 2021. Enel X will also supply non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) devices.

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