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A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Energy Sustainability".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 August 2021.
Special Issue Editors
Interests: energy and climate economics; applied econometrics; energy informatics
Interests: user-centered deep renovation; energy communities; peer-to-peer energy trading; energy policy
Interests: renewable energy policy; prosumers decentralised energy; energy communities; energy clusters
Special Issues and Collections in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Recent European legislation has paved the way for unleashing the potentials of community-driven collective investments in renewable energy sources and the joint utilisation thereof. These Directives provide the framework for granting such community-driven actions a certain level of support and have set the scene for the establishment of Citizen Energy Communities (Electricity Market Directive (EU) 2019/944) and Renewable Energy Communities (Renewable Energy Directive (EU) 2018/2001). The expectation about energy communities is high: they shall provide incentives to accelerate investments in renewable technology, stimulate the balancing of loads at the local level, enable new market players and business models in the field of energy cooperation and finally lead to a more sustainable electricity consumption and lower carbon footprint of the energy.
This Special Issue aims to publish high-quality research papers in the inter-disciplinary field of energy community research and its legal, regulatory, technical, economic and social science-related aspects system.
Besides the promising outlook, the starting phase of energy communities is characterised by a lack of knowledge of how best to exploit their potentials and what tools and instruments are needed to achieve a high level of acceptance among the population. In this Special Issue, we provide the latest insights from international research, investigating the concept of energy communities in all its aspects. Articles investigate the energy community concepts from a legal and regulatory point of view, and discuss alternatives to their definitions, as found in the Directives. Equally important, more technical investigations scruinize the power flows in energy communities, their potential to enhance renewables uptake, and what technical prerequisites are required to unleash their respective potential. Following the economic and social science perspective, the Special Issue contributes to a better understanding of the business models needed and what financially viable solutions can look like to achieve a rapid uptake of the energy community concept among the population. Together, the Special Issues provide the state of research when it comes to how energy communities can contribute to the mere sustainable consumption of electricity.
Dr. Johannes Reichl
Dr. Simona D'Oca
Dr. Yuvaraja Teekaraman
Guest Editors
Keywords
- citizen energy community
- renewable energy community
- energy efficiency
- renewable electricity market
- peer-to-peer energy trading