Impact of renewable energy communities on the Italian day-ahead electricity market: A scenario analysis

This paper evaluates the economic impact of Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) on the Italian wholesale electricity market. First, existing and emerging RECs in Italy are mapped to identify their installed capacity, membership composition, renewable technology mix, and geographical distribution across market zones. Second, this mapping is used to simulate energy injection and self-consumption profiles through a bottom-up engineering model for representative categories of REC members, including residential users, public-sector entities, small and medium-sized enterprises, non-profit organizations, and standalone installations, while accounting for variations in solar irradiance across Italian regions. Third, the resulting hourly zonal profiles are projected to construct alternative deployment scenarios, including the 5 GW policy target for 2027, and incorporated into a synthetic counterfactual framework to assess their effects on the Italian day-ahead electricity market. The results show that the deployment of RECs tends to increase the equilibrium quantities during daylight hours, while reducing them mainly in colder months. On average, market volumes vary within a range of −0.3% to + 1.16%. The reduction effect is largely driven by the different load profiles of institutional prosumers (public, SMEs, non-profits) compared to residential prosumers and becomes more pronounced as installed capacity increases. Overall, the coexistence of positive and negative effects suggests that REC deployment may contribute to reducing wholesale electricity prices. Finally, results indicate that including standalone installations within heterogeneous REC configurations can enhance overall system performance.