From smart energy community to smart energy municipalities: Literature review, agendas and pathways

The current energy and environmental target is the completely integration of the energy produced from different sources taking into account the renewables. The traditional power grids or thermal-cooling and heating conversion systems converge to the use of smart grids and to the planning of intelligent local organizations through energy integration techniques. This cannot be assessed as an isolated problem but an integrated one. The right construction of smart society is to match different challenges achieving sustainable energy systems not only from the point of view of energy consumption in different sectors (civil, industrial, agriculture, transport) and of the related of pollutants emissions, but considering simultaneously the relation with the socio-economic impact. The aim of this paper is firstly to examine the theories-approach to smart energy systems at the community level, the scientific literature of the smart energy community, the benefits of their potential applications in the smart energy municipalities. Finally, it manages the aspects related to smart energy community adoption with a multidisciplinary approach linking the technical conditions to the socio-economic systems of territorial planning. The main finding is that the concept of the intelligent energy community is strictly related to a coherent and intersectoral approach searching the best control strategy to satisfy all energy requirements. Moreover, the road leading to the smart energy community is essential to build the more sustainable renewable energy systems, to collect storage synergies between energy sub-sectors through the energy sharing and finally to exploit economically efficient sources.