Community Energy in Italy: Heterogeneous institutional characteristics and citizens engagement

by Chiara Candelise and Gianluca Ruggieri

Community energy (CE) initiatives for investments in the energy sector have been progressively spreading across Europe and are increasingly proposed as innovative and alternative approaches to guarantee higher citizens participation in the transition toward cleaner energy systems. This paper focuses the attention on Italy, a Southern European country characterized by relatively low CE sector development. It fills a gap in the literature by eliciting and presenting novel and comprehensive evidence on the recent Italian CE sector development. Through a step-wise approach it systematically map and review Italian CE initiatives, exploring heterogeneity in their institutional characteristics and analysing implications in terms of outcomes delivered and citizens’ engagement. It finds a very novel CE sector, still at its niche level and characterized by a wide diversity of implementation approaches. The analysis allows to identify two alternative patterns in institutional characteristics which differently shape citizens engagement and outcomes delivered. The role of policy and its relevance for a renewed CE sector growth is also highlighted and discussed.