Renewable energy communities (REC) are one of the instruments to increase uptake of renewable energy (RE) sources. The EU policy underlines the necessity of citizen wide involvement in the energy system transformation processes to meet the renewable energy (RE) targets. In the article, the energy community is understood as mostly locally-rooted form of co-operation in order to jointly use RE sources with the aim of producing RE dominantly for collective self-consumption and providing socio economic benefits for REC participants and particular local areas. The article estimates the potential of the households regarding rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV) uptake in Latvia. Evaluation is based on the cascade approach: starting with the technical solar PV potential, housing type analysis, then estimating the financial capacity of households and household investments statistics, finally the household willingness to invest in joint energy production is considered. As a result, REC potential to attract additional household investments to increase solar PV electricity production is calculated in the range from 43.69 MEUR to 87.42 MEUR. The REC potential to scale up RE in power generation is calculated for 76.6 GWh electricity in 2030, or 11.6% of the additional electricity from solar PV installations planned in the national energy-climate plan scenario. REC facilitating is understood as one of the policy wheels of municipal sustainable energy and climate action plans. By applying the regional model for climate change mitigation measure impact evaluation, the potential contribution of REC in greenhouse gas emission reduction and providing socio economic benefits for both REC participants and municipality are evaluated at the city level.
The article analyses the results of the 2016-2023 national programme of multi-apartment building renovation in Latvia, being importantly co-financed by ERDF, and there was used the publicly available database of this programme implementation, as of 31st December 2023. This was complementary analysed during the six deep semi-structured interviews with main stakeholders and experts at the municipal level particularly. Valmiera city and county municipality was chosen for a case study as one of the most pro-energy active municipalities in the country, having developed and introduced a complementary set of energy governance instruments. The challenges are particularly related to the management and economic aspects and their interconnection with engineering ones as being identified. Within 2016-2023 in total around 22.8 thousand apartments (over 620 buildings) are renovated at national scale, however that is only around 4% of the total number of apartments. The planned thermal energy savings constitute around 0.9% of the total final energy consumption of the household sector in Latvia as being the high impact. High energy efficiency for heating is achieved in the renovated buildings (after renovation, the “B” energy efficiency class is achieved on average), however, the low number of renovated buildings still limits the impact of the programme. The renovation projects have a long (around 30 years in average) payback period, if compared with the actual district heating tariffs, thus, such renovation is hardly possible without the public grant part. Particularly, for completed projects in 2023 the specific costs significantly increase. The renovation of apartment buildings is analysed in the context of the energy citizenship (ENCI) concept. About 60% of building renovation are carried out by the legal institutional forms established by apartment owners, particularly, housing associations registered as NGOs. During the renovation of buildings, zero-emission decentralized energy production technologies are not installed until now, only few examples can be noted. Although the requirements of this renovation programme allowed, it could be assumed that the overall management and economic conditions were not enough attractive for the promotion of pro-sumerism for households or organizations to practice both - produce and consume energy.
Innovative solutions are required to sustain the balance between energy generation and demand to achieve the desired efficiency in the power system and microgrid. With the recent advances in information and communication technologies that provide energy solution services based on big data analytics, machine learning (ML), and IoT technologies, the concept of digital twins (DT) has been introduced as a constructible active model to improve the security and resiliency of the microgrid. The DT is a reliable and economic microgrid technology considering its advantages of virtual real-time simulation, physical-based control, and constant monitoring. Moreover, DTs can predict future performance, energy consumers' behaviour, and a complex system's maintenance. This paper introduces a comprehensive framework for adapting the DT into applying a microgrid that interacts with the control system to ensure its information security and proper operation. Unlike other DT frameworks in the literature, the proposed for the local energy community. The framework was tested on a distributed network system. The implementation test concluded that the TalTech DT system is applicable for developing and validating power system applications.
The EU 2050 Climate Law, Green deal and Clean Energy Packages place the “citizen at the centre of the energy transition”. However, new actors in the clean energy transition such as Local Energy Communities (LECs) are challenged to participate in electricity markets in an equitable manner without adequate provision of open source tools and data to perform initial feasibility assessments and to support their day-to-day operations. LECs need support with many decisions, which business model to use, the size and location of renewable energy sources, and subsequent operational decisions on how much electricity to use, buy, store, or sell. In this paper we focus on the role of open renewable energy data for LEC initial feasibility assessments.
