The contribution of energy communities to the upscaling of photovoltaics in Germany and Italy

Energy communities (EC) are among the new actors in the energy market, playing an important role in the uptake of photovoltaics (PV) in European markets. This paper estimates their aggregate contribution to the low-carbon energy transition in terms of installed capacities for PV and evaluates their economic performance comparing with market prices. We compiled a database of PV facilities with 3672 entries for Germany and 64 entries for Italy. Our statistical analysis does not support an economic under-performance of EC. The aggregate contribution of EC currently amounts to 600–838 MWp installed capacity in Germany and 10.6 MWp installed capacity in Italy, which makes 1.2–1.7% and 0.07% of all PV installations in Germany and Italy, respectively.