There were the States General of the Green Economy meeting at Ecomondo in Rimini last November 5th. And it is there that the “RomeFlex” project by Areti (a company of the ACEA Group that manages Rome’s electricity network) received an award during the 2025 Sustainable Development Award. The CEO of Areti Raffaele De Marco and Francesca Coletta, CFO and head of the business unit that developed the project, received the award.
The Sustainable Development 2025 award, now in its 15th edition, was promoted by the Foundation for Sustainable Development and the Italian Exhibition Group, with the patronage of the Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security. “RomeFlex” was awarded because it is of particular interest in the sector of decarbonisation and adaptation to climate change. The project, developed by Areti, aims to create a complete, advanced and inclusive local flexibility market serving citizens and businesses. To address the growing electrification of consumption and the ever-increasing stress on the distribution network, an infrastructure capable of satisfying new needs and integrating innovative functions is needed. This requires the implementation of systems that guarantee operational flexibility and the digitalization of operations. With a “smart grid” connected citizens are offered the opportunity to actively participate in flexibility services and in exchange customers receive a clear and adequate financial remuneration for the service offered, thus lightening the burden of families’ energy expenditure. The flexibility system allows you to regulate your energy consumption or production to cope with peaks in demand on the electricity grid and keep it constantly in balanced and safe conditions, optimizing the quality of the service. Areti was the first Italian distributor (DSO) to launch a local flexibility market project managed by GME. Thanks to its advanced technological architecture and open market procedures, “RomeFlex” allows all customers, whose low or medium voltage systems are connected to Rome’s distribution network, to modulate their consumption and their own energy production: they can use, for example, the storage system of their own generation plant, of their electric car or by coordinating the operation of their household appliances.
«“RomeFlex” represents technological and market design excellence in terms of flexibility services and also has the objective of contributing to the ongoing energy transition process, which will lead to a transformation of the electricity sector, increasingly characterized by generation from renewable sources distributed throughout the territory as well as by the progressive growth of consumption linked to electric mobility and summer and winter air conditioning, increasingly achieved through heat pumps rather than gas boilers», declared the CEO of Areti Raffaele De Marco.