Energy Communities: Barriers and opportunities

Ioanna Theodosiou presents recommendations to support the deployment of Energy Communities in order to ovecome existing problems, in her comments to Machie Tratsa, journalist of the Sunday edition of the newspaper To VIMA.

Specifically she highlights the importance of the institution of Energy Communities in the energy transition. Energy Communities are a useful tool in order to meet the local energy needs and encourage citizens’ participation in the energy transformation. They contribute to the Just Transition to the post-lignite era and they represent another way of sharing the benefits of the transition equally and fairly in the local community. Hence, it is important to support the local efforts that are targeted towards public benefit, self-consumption for citizens, local businesses and municipalities and leave a significant economic, environmental and also social imprint to the local communities.

A supportive framework for energy communities could include:

  1. Special tax incentives linked to social reciprocity and benefit to local communities in a documented and measurable way.
  2. A specific competitive scheme only for energy communities. This way equal terms of participation in the energy market will be ensured for energy communities and a safety net will be created to help their development.
  3. The adoption of a mixed scheme of fit-in-tariff and competitive procedures that could be implemented as a transitional model before the entry to absolutely competitive procedures. Specifically, part of the installed capacity (eg. 1MW for solar power) can remain under the fit-in-tariff scheme as a horizontal supportive measure, while an energy community can enter the specific competitive scheme as mentioned earlier for the rest of the capacity.

The article titled “The “black holes” in energy communities” by Machie Tratsa was published (in Greek) in the Sunday edition of the newspaper To VIMA on 20.06.2021:

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