Implementing European Union Provisions and Enabling Frameworks for Renewable Energy Communities in Nine Countries: Progress, Delays, and Gaps

Abstract

With the Clean Energy for all Europeans legislative package, the European Union (EU) aimed to put consumers “at the heart” of EU energy policy. The recast of the Renewable Energy Directive (RED II) acknowledged the importance of energy communities for the energy transition and introduced new provisions for renewable energy communities (RECs), empowering them to participate in the energy market. This article analyses the progress of transposing and implementing key provisions of the RED II that apply to RECs in nine European countries and focuses on timeliness and completeness of transposition. It comprises both a qualitative and quantitative assessment covering (1) the definition, rights, and market activities of RECs; (2) key elements of enabling frameworks; and (3) consideration of REC specificities in support schemes for renewable energy. The analysis shows considerable variation in transposition performance between the analysed countries. The authors investigate the reasons for this variation and relate them to findings of European implementation and compliance research. Key factors identified include actor-related and capacity-related factors, institutional fit, and characteristics of the RED II itself. Future research in this field needs multi-faceted avenues and should pay particular attention to the influence of national governments and incumbents, not only in the transposition process, but already in upstream policy formulation at the European level.

The sensitivity demonstration and propagation of hyper-geometric soliton waves in plasma physics of Kairat-II equation

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Energy Communities and Electric Mobility as a Win–Win Solution in Built Environment

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The contribution of European citizen‐led energy initiatives to sustainable development goals

“…In Germany, the implementation of guaranteed feed-in tariffs precipitated a wave of new initiatives after 2010, while Denmark's pioneering status from the 1990s was thwarted by a paradigm shift in its wind energy development (Gorroño-Albizu et al, 2019;Kirch Kirkegaard et al, 2023). We anticipate that data for recent years will show a continued increase in many countries, including Austria, Italy, Greece, and Spain, as the ongoing process of transposing EU EC directives into national legislation continues to dismantle barriers (Fina & Fechner, 2021;Krug et al, 2023). Conversely, our data confirm that numbers are still small in many Eastern European countries (Capellán-Pérez et al, 2020;Schwanitz et al, 2022).…”

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