Biomass-based Renewable Energy Community: energy and environmental assessment of the Tirano municipality

Recent European Directives have promoted Renewable Energy Communities as pivotal drivers to achieve energy and environmental European targets. Thus, this paper analyses the energy and environmental feasibility of a Renewable Energy Community in the Northern Italy. An energy audit is carried out to identify the electricity balance within the primary substation and the thermal energy demand of the existing district heating network. The technical features of the energy conversion systems serving the Renewable Energy Community are determined: a biomass-based congenator, a mini-hydro, and a distributed photovoltaic system. Different scenarios are identified, in terms of congenator operating mode and photovoltaic systems peak power. The results show that, in the best scenario, the annual renewable electricity increases by 25.5% and 69.9% of the total thermo-electric requests are satisfied through biomass utilization. The bi-directional interactions with power grid are reduced from 60.0% to 51.7%. The electricity sharing allows a reduction of carbon dioxide emissions equal to 18.5%.