Three case studies to explore relevant features of emerging renewable energy communities in Italy

The number and importance of renewable energy communities (RECs) are increasing in all European countries due to the support of EU and national policies in order to foster the energy transition through participatory strategies for distributed energy systems. However, their development is rather slow in some countries, including Italy. The paper addressed the issue of the emergence of these socio-technical configurations in Italy, after the related law which entered into force in 2020 allowing the possibility of creating them. Our study focused on the alliances among different actors (professionals, institutions, NGOs, citizens) highlighting possible trends or models for the future that need to be confirmed in further research. The approach proposed to analyse this current process is the Actor-Network Theory, aiming at drawing the assemblages of human and non-human actants at a general level. Accordingly, we selected three case studies in order to show their different ways of organising, the relevance of trust in establishing each REC and the influence of local context on the composition and features of the actor-networks.