%0 Journal Article
%A Federico Rossi
%A Miguel Heleno
%A Riccardo Basosi
%A Adalgisa Sinicropi
%B Energy
%D 2021
%G eng
%P 121374
%R 10.1016/j.energy.2021.121374
%T LCA driven solar compensation mechanism for Renewable Energy Communities: the Italian case
%U https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0360544221016224
%V 235
%8 07/2021
%! Energy
%X <p><span><span><a class="topic-link" title="Learn more about Renewable energy communities from ScienceDirect's AI-generated Topic Pages" href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/community-renewable-energy">Renewable energy communities</a><span>&nbsp;are multi-users energy systems that are expected to become popular in all countries, including Italy. This paper discusses environmental-driven solar compensation mechanisms, specifically designed for energy communities. Such mechanisms consider the adoption of&nbsp;<a class="topic-link" title="Learn more about Distributed Energy Resources from ScienceDirect's AI-generated Topic Pages" href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/distributed-energy-resource">Distributed Energy Resources</a>&nbsp;by the communities and reflect their overall life cycle environmental benefit. Notably, an innovative three-steps iterative methodology is adopted to design new feed-in tariffs including: (i) the optimal economic sizing of solar technologies, (ii) the&nbsp;</span></span><a class="topic-link" title="Learn more about life cycle assessment from ScienceDirect's AI-generated Topic Pages" href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/life-cycle-assessment">life cycle assessment</a><span>&nbsp;and (iii) the evaluation of a solar compensation mechanism.&nbsp;<a class="topic-link" title="Learn more about In from ScienceDirect's AI-generated Topic Pages" href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/inverter">In</a>&nbsp;the last step, the emissions avoided by communities are converted into economic solar compensation mechanisms (via feed-in tariffs) using the current value of carbon taxes. After the general methodology description, the proposed approach is applied to a specific Italian case study. In case carbon taxes are set to the current value, namely 15.4 EUR/tonCO</span></span><span>2</span><span>eq, the yearly national emissions are mitigated by the adoption of the proposed solar compensation from 121.1 MtonCO</span><span>2</span><span>eq/yr to 108.2 MtonCO</span><span>2</span><span>eq/yr. Differently, if taxes are increased to 20 EUR/tonCO</span><span>2</span><span>eq, the emissions are reduced to 84.3 MtonCO</span><span>2</span><span>eq/yr; in case carbon taxes are extended over this value, the grid gets saturated by communities electricity and the additional environmental advantages are negligible.</span></p>