A Practical Methodology for Building a Municipality-Led Renewable Energy Community: A Photovoltaics-Based Case Study for the Municipality of Hersonissos in Crete, Greece

This paper presents a practical methodology to facilitate decision-making for the development of a renewable energy community (REC) in the municipality of Hersonissos in Crete, Greece. The impact of energy sharing produced from renewables through direct or indirect citizen participation presents an enormous opportunity to strengthen energy democracy and to alleviate energy poverty. Triggered by the latter being amongst the most essential goals for implementing policies towards low-carbon economies at the local level, the current study presents a step-by-step methodology to facilitate decision-making for building a municipality-led REC. Initially, potential sites and alternative sittings of photovoltaic (PV) plants are explored for detecting the optimal installation with respect to technical and possible legislative restrictions. The best REC business model is then selected based on a SWOT analysis, complemented with a detailed techno-economic analysis of the foreseen investments. According to the design calculations, the optimal PV plants/business-model option that emerged may achieve impressive environmental and economic benefits, i.e., reducing the municipality's annual electricity-induced CO2 emissions and electricity expenses by at least 68.40% and 594,461.54 euro, respectively.