Dalla complessità alla sostenibilità: un modello basato su agenti per lo sviluppo e la governance delle Comunità Energetiche Rinnovabili

Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) represent a decentralised model of sustainable energy production and consumption, consistent with ESG principles and aimed at improving energy self-sufficiency, reducing environmental impacts and strengthening social cohesion. This study uses an Agent-Based Model (ABM) to analyse citizen participation in RECs, integrating individual decisions influenced by bounded rationality, social interactions and governance tools, together with a technical simulation of photovoltaic energy production. System performance is evaluated using an aggregate utility index that combines economic, environmental, and social benefits. The simulations, implemented in NetLogo, show that in the absence of educational policies (education-effort = 0), incentives of 0.15 generate stable participation rates of 28–29%. A synergistic strategy combining education-effort = 0.4 and incentives = 0.15 increases participation to 47–48%, exceeding the theoretical critical threshold of 42%. Aggregate social welfare (ASW) follows a similar trend, growing from around 0.29 in the baseline scenario to 0.47 in the synergistic scenarios, with an overall increase of around +68%. In the absence of incentives, participation remains negligible (≈0–0.5%) even with high levels of education, highlighting the need for combined governance policies to trigger collective adoption dynamics. These results confirm that the success of RECs depends crucially on the integration of economic incentives, educational interventions and social dynamics, as well as on the technical feasibility of the energy system.