Experiences in Energy Community Implementation

Recording of Wednesday, June 19, 2024 | The smarter E Europe 2024 | Conference Program | Language: English | Duration: 12:46 .

EDP's Head of Business Development Highlights Focus on Energy Communities and SolarDG Expansion with a Goal to be Fully Green by 2030

Margarida Correia Pires, Head of Business Development at EDP, discusses the company's focus on energy communities and their commitment to becoming fully green by the decade's end. EDP is a vertically integrated company present in four global markets, including Asia-Pacific and America. They have installed 2 gigawatts of SolarDG across 15 countries, representing more than 1000 sites. Distributed generation (DG) makes up about 40-50% of new solar capacity investments due to its cost-effectiveness and quick deployment process. EDP installs solar plants on rooftops or customer land; surplus energy not self-consumed is shared with nearby community members within a radius of 2 to 20 kilometers. The initial investment is made by EDP, which charges clients based on self-consumption rates. Portugal’s legislation has facilitated this expansion through flexible regulations, effective stakeholder engagement processes, incentives like exemption from grid tariffs for seven years, and streamlined procedures for converting individual to collective self-consumption systems. Pires emphasizes testing new use cases tailored to client needs as crucial for accelerating adoption—citing an example where multi-site solutions were developed upon client requests.

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Speaker

Margarida Correia Pires
Head of Business Development
EDP Comercial
Portugal

Talk of session: Energy Communities and Smart Energy Sharing

Energy communities, whose members engage in self-consumption and local energy sharing of renewable energy, offer significant potential. Besides smart energy sharing, members of the community cooperate in energy production and consumption.

The recent energy market revision recognizes the potential of energy communities for reducing grid congestion and promoting local decarbonization efforts, and their contribution to standardizing processes and aligning them with existing structures.

Explore the potential of energy communities, direct citizen involvement and local decarbonization projects that ensure grid security and customer protection.