Europe's Green Deal aims to put citizens at the heart of the energy transition by ensuring fairness and inclusiveness. This follows the Clean Energy for All Europeans legislative package (CEP), which acknowledges ‘active customers’, ‘renewables self-consumers’, ‘renewable energy communities’ (RECs), and ‘citizens energy communities’ (CECs) as distinct market actors in the energy transition. The second generation EU legislation for energy communities, including the REPowerEU Package, the Fit for 55 Package and the revised Electricity Market Design, recognises the important role energy communities can play in a lot of different activities in the market, including energy sharing and their contribution to larger projects, such as offshore wind projects.

In addition to the EU legislation promoting equality and a level playing field in the Internal Energy Market (IEM), competition and State aid policy also recognise the specific characteristics of RECs and introduce measures to make sure that they are able to compete with larger actors in renewable auctions.

Moreover, the recently introduced EU Wind Power Action Plan highlights the contribution of wind energy projects into the achievement of the ambitious EU renewable targets and states the importance of non-price criteria in auction design. However, there is no reference to energy communities, their contribution to social acceptance of renewable projects and the need for the Member States to take the specificities of such initiatives into account when they design auctions for onshore and offshore wind projects. Such references should therefore be included in the relevant guidance document that the European Commission is preparing, in line with the requirements of the Green Deal.

This position paper shares REScoop.eu’s response to the call for evidence on the design elements of renewable energy auctions