Energy Community and Citizenship as Enabling Actions for Integrated Energy Plan Implementation and Urban Energy Transition

Abstract

One of the main challenges of the future is to create climate-neutral and smart cities—with zero CO₂ emissions by 2050. Cities have to be conceived, planned and designed in order to remain competitive and survive growing populations, scarce resources and changeable and unpredictable built environments by putting sustainability, health and the quality of citizens’ lives at the centre. Starting from the climate-neutral city vision, this paper aims to investigate the link between integrated energy plans developed by cities and the emergence of energy community as enabling action for the implementation of plans. Methodological examples of integrated energy plans, such as the SmartEnCity (SmartEnCity—Towards Smart Zero CO₂ Cities across Europe, H2020 GA691883) methodology and the Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plan (SECAP) developed by the European Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy, are considered. The analysed GECO (Green Energy Communities, EIT Climate KIC TC_2.2.15_190736_P125-1) and GRETA (Green Energy Transition Actions, H2020 GA101022317) research projects attempt to solve the complex issue of coordinating multiple stakeholders, different sources of funding and innovative technologies under the umbrella of a legislative and contractual framework in a replicable scheme all over Europe. The lesson learnt of this paper contributes to highlighting how integrated energy plans can favour the emergence of energy community, as legal entity, and energy citizenship, as new definition of consumer, and help to move from the planning to implementation phases, as well as opening to new questions that will be developed in future research.