Community energy: an organisation concept rather than a set of activities | Josh Roberts (REScoop)

Community energy is one of the current buzzwords in the public discourse over the electricity sector and the energy transition. Within a community, citizens can adopt new models for the production and consumption of energy. Among them, there are peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading and collective self-consumption.

In this podcast, Nicolò Rossetto (FSR) and Josh Roberts (REScoop) discuss the concept of community energy and its relation with new energy models like P2P trading and prosumption. According to Mr Roberts, community energy should not be defined by a set of activities or functions, but it is rather an organisational concept that refers to a certain type of governance. In an energy community, citizens or users must have the control and possibly the ownership of the assets used by the community itself. Third parties may be involved, but they cannot have the lead. If someone accepts this definition, then it is clear that P2P trading and collective self-consumption can be of different types and do not represent a sufficient condition for the existence of a true energy community.
This kind of distinctions is not mere details relevant for academics only. On the contrary, it may have important implications for the current transposition of the European directives into national legislation and the future of community energy in the EU.

You may listen to another interview with Josh Roberts here:

This podcast was recorded on 18th February 2020 in Florence during the second meeting (https://fsr.eui.eu/event/global-observatory-on-peer-to-peer-community-self-consumption-and-transactive-energy-models/) of the Global Observatory on Peer-to-Peer, Community Self-Consumption and Transactive Energy Models (https://userstcp.org/annex/peer-to-peer-energy-trading/), organised by the Florence School of Regulation (FSR) in cooperation with the University College London (UCL) and the financial support by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the United Kingdom.