Energy communities, Italy now has a map of primary substations: the next steps

Finally there is the treasure map. An interactive map of Italy that should lead Italians to discover the treasure chest of opportunities represented by the CERs, the renewable energy communities. From now on, companies and individuals will be able to type in their address and find out which one is theirs primary cabin to which to connect, and therefore together with whom (in that same area) they can associate to create a CER, because all the members of a community must have the same primary substation.

And then let’s do the experiment. On the website of one of the electricity distribution companies that offer the service, we type in the home address, a country road in a small town in southern Lazio. The dot relating to the address appears on the map, within a light blue area marked by the acronym AC00100331: all those who live in this blue area share the same primary cabin as the undersigned, and therefore could join the same CER .

But here the surprises begin: the neighboring area (colored pink and called AC00100320) starts a few hundred meters from the entered address, and includes the historic center of the municipality where I, the undersigned, reside. According to the map, therefore, the writer could join an energy community with someone who lives 10 km away and resides in a different municipality (but shares the same primary substation) and not with the neighbor who lives in the same village, just 300 meters further, but beyond the “border”.

“This is just one of the knots to untie,” he confirms Sergio Olivero, from the Energy Center of the Turin Polytechnic, an expert in renewable energy communities. “The map of the primary cabins is the second fundamental step forward, after the Minister of the Environment last week Piquet Friarsn announced that it has sent the European Commission the draft decree on CERs. But some details remain to be defined. And one of the most important is deciding what happens when the border between two primary substations splits a homogeneous territory in half”.

If a Municipality “divided in two” wanted to take advantage of the economic and environmental benefits of the energy communities, should it create two, one for each of the primary cabins present? Or will there be a derogation for cases like this? “At the moment it is not known”, replies Professor Olivero, “but, this is my personal hope, I imagine that there will be specific rules on companies and individuals who reside between the borders of the various areas identified by the maps”.

It will be up to the Gse, the Energy Services Manager, unravel the skein. And the times are not announced immediately. We will have to wait for the go-ahead from the EU Commission for the ministerial decree, then the government will have to approve the final version and make it operational. At that point, the GSE will have 60 days to define the technical procedures. In short, the new and long-awaited CERs will probably have to wait for the autumn. “But that’s not certain”, confides Olivero. “In January we were told that the map would be released on February 28. Many welcomed the announcement with irony, given the delays that have dotted the history of energy communities in Italy. Instead, the map even arrived a day early. Who knows, it won’t happen again now that we’re in the final stretch.”