Report: Barriers and action drivers for the development of energy communities & their activities

While energy communities can provide added value to Europe’s energy transition in terms of fostering social acceptance, private capital investment and flexibility, their unique characteristics also present specific challenges in trying to enter and participate in the market with larger commercial market actors.

The main focus of this Report is to identify and assess different barriers and action drivers that impact the development of energy communities at national level in the context of European Union legislation, including but not limited to the RED II and IMED. Specifically, this Report focuses on action drivers and barriers for energy communities to engage in:

• Renewable energy production – Community-owned energy production from various renewable sources including wind, sun, geothermic, biomass, micro-hydro, and biogas;
• Sharing of renewable energy – Through a community-owned production facility and the use of smart meters, members of the community can closely match consumption (e.g. 15 minutes to 1 hour) so that the production is treated as self-consumption and deducted from their metered supply coming from their traditional supplier;
• Retail supply of electricity and gas – the sale, including through power purchase agreements (PPAs) , and resale (using existing market structures such as the wholesale market) of electricity and gas by the community to its members and potentially other customers (e.g. households, other local SMEs and public authorities); and
• Participation in flexibility – Different business models where the community and its members can realise potential revenue streams or cost saving through the use of production and demand-side assets to increase, shift or reduce electricity consumption in response to time-differentiated price signals (e.g. for the purpose of peak-shaving) or to access different accessible flexibility markets (e.g. balancing, ancillary services, and capacity markets).

This Report also highlights cross-cutting drivers and barriers that impact an energy community’s ability to operate across the market, regardless of the activity. For this Report, we define an ‘action driver’ as a factor that helps to push or propel forward a particular activity exercised by an energy community. Correspondingly, we define a ‘barrier’ as the counter-acting opposite of an action driver: something that disproportionately prevents or makes harder a particular activity from being realised.

Language: English