Assessing the Impacts of Energy Communities: An Overview of (Potential) Costs and Benefits

According to the recast Renewable Energy Directive (RED II), member states (MS) of the European Union (EU) are supposed to take out assessments of barriers for and potential of renewable energy communities in their countries (RED II, Art. 22 Para. 3). The European legislator has not specified this provision, i.e. the content and form of these assessments has not been clarified (yet). It is only clear from the legal text that these assessments should be the basis of the “enabling framework” (RED II, Art. 22 Para. 4) that EU MS shall provide. The project aims at developing a template for the assessments.

In the paper, we briefly review existing studies on impacts of energy communities, based on the Berka & Creamer (2018) study. We group potential costs and benefits into three categories: effectiveness, emancipation and legitimacy, respectively. We add literature and known effects from references in Berka & Creamer (2018) plus some selected additional works.

This background paper is part of a study on a model assessment of potential and barriers to the development of renewable energy communities at the national level, commissioned by REScoop.eu.