Università Politecnica delle Marche (UNIVPM) is located in Central Italy. It has various campuses across the region that may constitute a local energy community.
UNIVPM can be considered as an energy hub with four sub hubs at sites Ancona (Italy). UNIVPM accounts for a total of around 17,000 students and staff. The sites consist mostly of colleges and offices, and among these the site of Monte Dago is a multi-energy microgrid (micro-energy hub).
This pilot focuses on the four main sites located in Ancona:
- Montedago multi-energy microgrid (three faculties: Engineering, Life Sciences and Agriculture);
- Faculty of Economics;
- Faculty of Medical Sciences;
- UNIVPM Rectorate (headquarters).
Sites 2, 3 and 4 are almost passive users with no distributed energy resources (DER). Site 1 is a multi energy-microgrid. The Italian pilots aims at:
- Demonstrating the role of both UNIVPM (acting as an “energy aggregator” of these four sites) and of the Montedago multi-energy microgrid (acting as a micro- energy hub);
- Demonstrating that the higher integration among energy vectors/networks (natural gas, electricity, district heating/cooling, hydrogen and transports) contributes to increasing the flexibility of the energy system in presence of a high share of renewable energy.