Sustainable Energy Contracts and Smart Cities

The issue of environmental sustainability appears increasingly central and strategic in the definition of economic growth policies both in the European and the Italian legal landscape. In the private sector, the issue of the principles and values to which the acts must adjust has been proposed above all for the regulation of contract law and the classic notion of contract is thus insufficient, if not complemented by the principles of solidarity, subsidiarity and sustainability as shown in the example of the “ecological” energy performance contract. In the field of renewable energy, we are witnessing a gradual process of conversion of energy production and exchange systems from centralised models to decentralised models, where the new legal entities of the prosumer (consumer-producer) and the citizens’ energy/social communities emerge. Starting from the role of the energy consumer as an “actor” and not as a “passive spectator” of this transformation, we address the issue of Sustainable Smart Cities where the new legal forms of energy production and exchange constitute their infrastructures. Although the latter are still being tested, they seem to constitute the necessary sustainable evolution of urban realities. Sustainable development is also based on the concept of energy redevelopment, efficiency and digital energy.