Comprehensive Assessment of Energy Saving Potential in Renewable Energy Communities: A Case Study of Guzmán Renovable, Spain
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Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) are legally recognised collective entities through which citizens generate, share, and manage renewable energy. Despite grow-ing policy recognition under the EU's Clean Energy for All Europeans package, no standardised operational performance assessment tool exists at the community level. This thesis addresses that gap by developing a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) frame-work designed to evaluate REC performance across energy, economic, and environ-mental dimensions, with the goals of supporting reductions in energy cost and green-house gas (GHG) emissions, applied to the case study of Guzmán Renovable (a REC in Burgos, Spain).
A KPI framework grades its five indicators: Energy Performance Certificate (EPC), Self-Sufficiency, Self-Consumption, Payback Period, and Energy Poverty Rate. These indicators are graded on an A-to-F scale against REC benchmarks from Spain, Belgium, and the Netherlands, then aggregated into a weighted community score. Building Energy Simulation , calibrated against measured data, was applied to the two lowest-energy-performing buildings to quantify envelope and active system retrofit impacts, and analyse the consequences in the REC.
The baseline assessment placed the REC at an overall grade of D, which put most of its KPIs under the average REC performance across Western European bench-marks. Different retrofitting levels were analysed for the two lowest-performing build-ings, achieving a maximum of 75% reduction in Primary Energy Consumption and im-proving their EPC grade from F/G to B.
However, the building-level efficiency gains did not uniformly translate to im-provements in other indicators. For the electricity-heated building, the Self-Consumption Rate decreased by up to 28% under the fixed PV allocation key, while the Self-Sufficiency Rate improved by only 14%. For the biomass-heated building, electrifi-cation may increase net greenhouse gas emission due to the Spanish grid carbon in-tensity. Consequently, the overall REC grade of retrofit scenarios remained at D. These findings indicate that effective REC cost and GHG reduction require coordinated atten-tion to building efficiency, context-sensitive fuel switching, and revision of the PV allo-cation mechanism to reflect post-retrofit profiles.