This study explores the complexities surrounding the adoption of decentralised Renewable Energy Technologies in Spain, crucial for transitioning towards a renewable energy-driven economy. Through a systematic review of both scientific and grey literature, key factors influencing adoption were identified. Utilising the Analytic Network Process method, this research highlights political will, technological maturity, and fiscal incentives as primary drivers. These findings underscore the importance of mature technologies and incentivisation strategies in expediting adoption. Conversely, addressing barriers necessitates a multifaceted approach, presenting challenges for policy formulation. However, the analysis reveals a positive cascade effect, wherein strengthening primary drivers positively impacts others within their domain. This pattern is mirrored in the barriers. Furthermore, the study reveals consistent factors across technologies, adopter types, and regions. The three-axis analysis shows the largest differences in terms of the type of adopter, followed by the type of technology. The smallest differences are found by region, emphasising the unifying influence of the EU framework. This suggests a unified approach to policy design and promotion efforts.

This research raises the possibility for households in energy poverty to participate in shared photovoltaic systems in renewable energy communities (REC) to reduce their energy costs, with investment costs covered by public institutions. It begins by evaluating the current solution for vulnerable households, which relies on public subsidies to lower energy costs without addressing root causes or improving environmental impacts. The study compares traditional subsidies with REC participation for vulnerable households. By simulating a REC composed of such households, the results indicate that REC participation is more cost-effective for public institutions than energy subsidies. At the economically optimal size of 31 kWp, the cost of subsidies decreases by 58,000 €, a 50% reduction, with household savings increasing by 6%. At 58 kWp, the need for additional support checks is eliminated, increasing household savings by 65% but with a lower NPV of 22,500 €. The largest viable system, 75 kWp, increases average household savings by 82%. This approach also leads to a net reduction in GHG emissions, engaging previously excluded households in the energy transition.

The authors regret <To not have included during the publication process the acknowledgement to a project that has been part of this work and want to include in the acknowledgements part: This work was partially supported by the Grant TED2021-129722B-C31 (ALIVE-DER), funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by “European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR”. >. The authors would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Identifying districts’ potential to become Positive Energy Districts (PED) is challenging but strategic since they are considered critical enablers for cities’ carbon neutrality. PEDs are city areas with a positive annual energy balance, achieved primarily through energy efficiency and renewable energy generation while ensuring sufficient energy flexibility. This investigation introduces a methodological framework designed to prioritise and comprehend the potential PED status of diverse districts within a city, drawing upon predetermined criteria and expert insights. The study employs a combination of Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) and Analytic Network Process (ANP) methodologies to scrutinise the city's various districts and the influencing criteria. The method's applicability is tested through to the specific case of Valencia City. The study reveals that the importance of specific criteria in attaining PED varies according to the distinctive attributes of each district. Furthermore, variations emerge based on the perspective and expertise of the contributing experts. The results of this application allowed the selection of the 19 most influential criteria, organised into technical, social, urban, environmental and economic clusters. The two economic criteria (Investement and Grant or projects), one social criterion (Interest or acceptance) and one technical (Potential for retrofitting the buildings), are the most influential overall. The evaluation of the 19 administrative districts of Valencia for each criterion allowed the identification of the districts on the city's outskirts as having the greatest potential to be energy-positive. In conclusion, the proposed methodology aids decision-making in a city's urban energy planning on a district-by-district basis.

Future power systems, in which generation will come almost entirely from variable Renewable Energy Sources (vRES), will be characterized by weather-driven supply and flexible demand. In a simulation of the future Dutch power system, we analyze whether there are sufficient incentives for market-driven investors to provide a sufficient level of security of supply, considering the profit-seeking and myopic behavior of investors. We co-simulate two agent-based models (ABM), one for generation expansion and one for the operational time scale. The results suggest that in a system with a high share of vRES and flexibility, prices will be set predominantly by the demand’s willingness to pay, particularly by the opportunity cost of flexible hydrogen electrolyzers. The demand for electric heating could double the price of electricity in winter, compared to summer, and in years with low vRES could cause shortages. Simulations with stochastic weather profiles increase the year-to-year variability of cost recovery by more than threefold and the year-to-year price variability by more than tenfold compared to a scenario with no weather uncertainty. Dispatchable technologies have the most volatile annual returns due to high scarcity rents during years of low vRES production and diminished returns during years with high vRES production. We conclude that in a highly renewable EOM, investors would not have sufficient incentives to ensure the reliability of the system. If they invested in such a way to ensure that demand could be met in a year with the lowest vRES yield, they would not recover their fixed costs in the majority of years.

This study develops a methodology to characterise and forecast large consumers’ electricity demand, particularly municipalities, with hundreds of different metered supply points based on the previous characterisation of facilities’ consumption. Demand forecasting allows consumers to improve their participation in electricity markets and manage their electricity consumption. The method considers a classification by different types of metered supply points combined with artificial neural networks to obtain hourly forecasts using well-known parameters such as day types, hourly temperature, the last hour of electricity consumption, and sunrise and sunset time. We apply the methodology to the municipality of Valencia using over five hundred hourly load profiles for a year during 2017 and 2018. Our results present aggregated forecasts with a maximum Mean Absolute Percentage Error of 3.8% per day, outperforming the same forecast without classifying Metered Supply Points. We conclude that a correct electricity demand forecast for a consumer with different types of consumption does not need submetering, but characterising Metered Supply Points is an option with lower costs that allows for better predictions.

This research raises the possibility for households in energy poverty to participate in energy communities to alleviate their energy costs, having their investment costs paid by public institutions. The study starts from the current solution for vulnerable households based on public subsidies to reduce energy costs, which neither addresses the problem's causes nor improves the residential energy systems' environmental profile. It compares the business-as-usual solution, energy checks, with the participation of vulnerable households in energy communities. We simulate a renewable energy community composed of vulnerable households to calculate the usefulness of this solution. he chosen vulnerable households are doubly vulnerable because they are older people experiencing social isolation and loneliness. The results show that participating in energy communities can be a better economic option for public institutions than paying energy subsidies. Moreover, most households increase their savings, and in all cases, it results in a net reduction of GHG emissions, engaging households unable to participate in their current situation in the energy transition.

Gender studies have highlighted how policies and actions that are not drafted and planned with a gender perspective tend to produce a gender bias. Climate policies are not an exception. Measures to mitigate and adapt cities to climate change might lead to undesired outcomes regarding gender equality or, in contrast, may help to improve equality. Ideally, cities should prioritise actions that aim to reduce their carbon footprint but also help promote gender equality. The aim is to facilitate the inclusion of gender perspective in the 100 Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities by 2030 European Mission. We propose a Multicriteria Decision-Making Method to assess urban policies and relate them to climate and gender criteria. We describe urban decarbonisation policies with non-negative gender outcomes and compare their impact when using climate and gender criteria. The objective is to analyse how the prioritisation of actions varies from different perspectives: one taking into account the field of expertise of the different experts and the other taking into account the different typologies of criteria separately. A DEMATEL-ANP technique is used to determine how policies contribute to climate action and gender equality. Experts in different areas and city planning respond to the DEMATEL-ANP model by comparing and relating criteria and actions. The results show which policies have a significant potential to reduce cities’ carbon footprint and increase gender equality. Prioritisation of policies changes when only gender criteria or climate criteria are considered. Regarding the former, it can be concluded that gender criteria will contribute to closing the gender gap while having a widening impact on decarbonisation. Nevertheless, including gender criteria is not enough to avoid bias, and multidisciplinary teams must participate in the decision-making process.

This research aims to diagnose the energy performance of buildings in València and identify areas where energy efficiency can be improved. The energy performance results of all 129,487 EPCs in the city were mapped and compared to socioeconomic variables to gain insights into the reasons behind the results. The study reveals that the city's building stock has poor energy performance, attributed to the lack of building standards during the city's expansion in the 1960s and 1970s. The worst energy performances are observed in the peripheral districts, particularly in the city's northern half, where low-income and low-renting rates are common, resulting in reduced investment capacity for individuals to retrofit their homes. To promote quick dissemination of measures to retrofit households, they must be adequate, economical, and replicable, avoiding social, administrative, and economic barriers. The study highlights the importance of EPCs as an objective tool to diagnose the energy efficiency of a city's building stock. Policymakers can use the findings to identify areas that require improvements and evaluate the appropriate actions to improve the building stock's energy performance. This study presents significant potential to reduce buildings’ energy demand and achieve climate goals through EPCs.

The intermittent nature of the renewable energy sources with the greater potential, wind and solar, requires dealing with temporary mismatches between demand and supply. The object of this study is to assess the Spanish energy plan from a system perspective regarding the energy storage requirements to meet electricity demand with high penetrations of renewable energy generation. We use a model that builds on existing literature and commercial software and integrates features such as demand response modelling, the correlation between reserve requirements and the technology mix, and hydrogen as an energy vector. This representation is applied to the Spanish electricity system to assess the consistency of the targets of the national energy strategy. Several scenarios of costs, demand and variation of other parameters are simulated to analyse their relative influence on the solution of minimum cost, especially assessing the sensitivity of energy storage capacity. The simulation results show that the Spanish goals for decarbonising the electricity system are based on optimistic assumptions. Also, energy storage will play a more important role than expected, and the use of hydrogen for energy storage is only needed for a 100% penetration of renewable energies.

The adoption of distributed energy resources such as PV cells, electric vehicles and batteries in electric grids is increasing steadily. This brings new challenges for distribution networks. The current network tariffs were not designed for these types of usage and, in many cases, they are not adequate anymore. Thus, many new tariff frameworks have been proposed. In this paper, we focus on the question of how to assess whether a given tariff framework fulfills its objectives. We propose to use quantitative indicators for performance assessment. We give examples of indicators for common objectives and demonstrate how they can be derived from a cost-accounting methodology for distribution networks.