Assessment of Italian Distribution Grids and Implications for Energy Communities’ Integration: A Focus on Reverse Power Flow and Energy Balance

This study evaluates the potential impact of new energy communities (ECs) on the electric infrastructure within the Italian regulatory framework using publicly available information on reverse power flow metrics in high-voltage (HV)/medium-voltage (MV) interfaces and calculating the municipal energy balance. The current legislation is incentivizing EC configurations where members connected to the same HV/MV interface are sharing energy, predominantly produced by new-generation units. To identify critical territories, primary substation service areas are overlapped with reverse flow occurrences, focusing on cases that exceed 5% of the year. The output is utilized to indicate the municipalities that fall within these areas. The municipalities deemed critical are further evaluated, defining a Key Performance Index (KPI) as the ratio of local production capacity to consumption, with generation data procured by the national database on production units and load estimates derived from provincial cumulative data, adjusted using census information on population and employment with a municipal resolution. A piecewise linearization approach is employed to examine the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the KPI, enabling a traffic light-like criticality classification. The results provide a relative assessment and highlight municipalities with a higher risk of detrimental impact of EC adoption within the current framework. The outcome is presented as a national georeferenced map illustrating the municipal criticality. This emphasizes the need for revising the regulative framework, potentially enabling the utilization of existing generators in critical areas and leveraging load flexibility and increased local energy sharing to procure benefits from EC adoption.