The peer-to-peer (P2P) trading of electricity is a recently developed type of transaction in the electricity system. In a P2P electricity trade, two equal market participants, in most cases prosumers, conclude a contract for the trade of electricity. This article provides a review of the legal context of P2P electricity trading, with a focus on European energy law. Furthermore, the article discusses the relation of P2P electricity trading to the phenomenon of the collaborative economy and to parallel technological developments taking place in the electricity system. We conclude that while the current state of European Union energy law might in principle allow P2P electricity trading, the lack of specific provisions is likely to cause issues in practice.

The Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, created in 1992 and currently directed by Professor Brigid Laffan, aims to develop inter-disciplinary and comparative research on the major issues facing the process of European integration, European societies and Europe's place in 21 st century global politics.The Centre is home to a large post-doctoral programme and hosts major research programmes, projects and data sets, in addition to a range of working groups and ad hoc initiatives. The research agenda is organised around a set of core themes and is continuously evolving, reflecting the changing agenda of European integration, the expanding membership of the European Union, developments in Europe's neighbourhood and the wider world.

How to recognise potential disasters is a question at the centre of risk analysis. Over-reliance on an incomplete, often epistemologically-biased, historical record, and a focus on quantified and quantifiable risks, have contributed to unanticipated disasters dominating both casualties and financial losses in the first part of the 21st century. Here we present the findings of an online workshop implementing a new scenario-planning method, called downward counterfactual analysis, which is designed to expand the range of risks considered. Interdisciplinary groups of disaster researchers constructed downward counterfactuals for a present-day version of the 365CE Cretan earthquake and tsunami, imagining how these events might have been worse. The resulting counterfactuals have trans-national, long-term impacts, particularly in terms of economic losses, and connect risks previously identified in separate sectors. Most counterfactuals involved socio-political factors, rather than intrinsic components of the hazard, consistent with the idea that there are “no natural disasters”. The prevalence of cascading counterfactuals in our workshop suggests that further work is required to give the appropriate weight to pre-existing economic and social conditions in scenario-planning methods, such as downward counterfactual analysis, which focus on the occurrence of a hazard as the temporal starting point for a disaster. Both proposed counterfactuals and their justifications reflect a bias towards contemporary issues and recent historical disasters. We suggest that interdisciplinary groups can expand the range of imagined risks. However, the setup used here would be improved by including local stakeholders. Qualitative forms of downward counterfactual analysis have potential applications for community engagement and education, as well as for risk analysis.