MIEMA, together with other PEGASUS project partners from France and Croatia, took part at in an informal discussion at the FEDARENE (European Federation of Agencies and Regions for Energy and Environment) office in Brussels, about the micro-grid business models deriving from the PEGASUS pilot-cases implementation in 7 rural and island MED areas.
In the presence also of representatives from REScoop (European Federation of Renewable Energy Cooperatives), EU Commission and IAS (Internal Audit Service), the workshop was an opportunity for project partners and technical experts to outline the importance – for EU Member States – to encourage the use of local renewables sources (RES); and to provide national legal frameworks with the right tools to enable “energy communities” at local level, as recently stressed by the EU Clean Energy package integrating energy community in the European Legislation.
MIEMA explained that in this new scenario, the results achieved by the Interreg MED PEGASUS project, within the pilot-case study of San Lawrenz Local Council (Gozo), seem to be in line with the micro-grids promising solutions of reducing the cost of energy for the micro-grid community members. This in addition to providing a more reliable energy supply by using RES particularly in vulnerable areas such as islands and rural areas.
In fact, the proposed micro-grid model may be defined as a community-level energy system that can provide cleaner energy and reliability of supply through the integration of distributed RES (and possibly energy storage system). Based on the cost benefit analysis carried out, it can be seen that maximising self-consumption between the different micro-grid community members and establishing a collective self-consumption agreement can be financially feasible, also in the case of higher consumers that are paying high electricity tariffs to the main grid, and may purchase electricity at a lower tariff from the micro-grid.
In terms of environmental impact, micro-grids can also allow higher penetration of RES into the grid and can possibly provide services to the grid with respect to peak shaving, load levelling, load shifting and power quality management with the final goal to reduce greenhouses gas emissions.
The experience of MIEMA within the San Lawrenz micro-grid model will be also published on the “FEDARENE Info 47 – Focus on Steps Forward for Renewable Energy Communities in Europe” related to the economic, technical and administrative conditions necessary for the development of micro-grids on the Maltese Gozo Island.
In conclusion, participants had a chance to gain some insights from the key learning of the PEGASUS project, exchange on their own experiences with similar projects and together lay the ground for new projects and strategies.
For further info: https://pegasus.interreg-med.eu/ and https://www.fedarene.org/
