Thermo-economic analysis and dynamic simulation of a novel layout of a renewable energy community for an existing residential district in Italy.

• Novel layout to be easily adopted by existing residential districts. • The novel layout can reduce the primary energy consumption of the residential district. • A primary energy saving index of 38 % and payback period of 2.2 years is achieved. • Power to heat strategy increases the district self-consumed electricity by 15%. • The power to heat strategy is able to further exploit the excess renewable electricity. This paper aims at reducing both electricity and space heating demands of residential districts. It specifically investigates the emerging paradigm, based on renewable energy communities, for existing residential districts. In particular, a novel renewable energy community layout is analyzed. This layout integrates a district heating network and the power to heat control strategy. The proposed system is designed to prevent any major refurbishment inside the apartments, using the existing high temperature space heating system. This arrangement is compared with more conventional renewable energy community layouts. Detailed dynamic models for both the residential district and the proposed layouts are developed using the TRNSYS software. Results show that renewable energy community is an extremely profitable paradigm for promoting the use of renewables at residential buildings scale. Moreover, the layout integrating energy community, district heating network, and Power-to-Heat strategy achieves the best results with a payback period of 2.2 years and a primary energy saving of 38 %. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]