December 2020 - Together with COMPILE partner Joanneum Research and with contributions from the rest of the consortium, REScoop.eu has published a working paper titled “Collective self-consumption and energy communities: Trends and challenges in the transposition of the EU framework”.

With the “Clean energy for all Europeans” package, the European Union introduced new provisions on the energy market design and frameworks for new energy initiatives. Specifically, the recasts of the renewable energy directive and the electricity market directive provide basic definitions and requirements for the activities of individual and collective self-consumption as well as for two types of energy communities. “Renewable energy communities” and “citizen energy communities”, allow citizens to collectively organise their participation in the energy system.

The main aim of this paper is to understand, compare, and assess the emerging regulatory concepts in member states and provide an overview of issues arising during transposition. It discusses some major developments in the transposition process that can be observed. This includes in particular concepts related to geographical, administrative, or system-related (e.g. electricity grid level) boundaries, specific grid tariffs for collective self-consumption and renewable energy communities, as well as questions of membership and governance in both types of energy communities