Renewable Energy Communities Monitoring, Optimization, and Planning. The RECMOP Research Project

The concentration of anthropogenic activities in cities has made them more and more energy-intensive, with an increase in climate-changing emissions and local temperature, seriously threatening the quality of life and, more generally, urban sustainability. Urban planning cannot fail to address these needs, which must be placed among its primary objectives. Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) are a promising tool for tackling these global challenges, as well as energy poverty. However, despite promotion policies at both European and national level, RECs are struggling to spread across Member States, mainly due to the absence of transparent and accessible data on the benefits provided, the territorializability of projects and the absence of incentives at local level. This contribution aims to describe an ongoing research project, titled “Renewable Energy Communities Monitoring, Optimization and Planning (RECMOP)”, intended to design a monitoring network to address the above-mentioned open questions. It is aimed at optimizing the space-time configurations of RECs, in order to maximize its social, environmental and economic benefits. The same network will support urban planning through the construction of cognitive frameworks that provide transparent and accessible information, to citizens and stakeholders, of the relevant parameters for the optimization of existing and future RECs. The monitoring network is based on a WEB platform and GeoAI technology, integrated with data from satellites, in situ and shared by citizens and stakeholders.