Renewable energy communities: accessing local renewable electricity

In this report, prepared in cooperation with Meridiam, Omexom, Services Industriels de Genève and Total, Enea explores the conditions for the emergence of collective self-consumption projects globally.

Collective Self-consumption (CSC) is a framework that supports the energy transition in the electricity sector by facilitating the collective sharing of renewable electricity generation assets within a community of prosumers.

CSC projects are promising projects as they have the capacity to further develop local renewable electricity. These projects can reach new market segments which would be excluded from distributed generation otherwise, including some of the four billion energy consumers currently living in urban areas. CSC will also benefit owners of distributed generation by monetising, and thus maximizing, the value of the electricity they generate.

However, the wide scale emergence and deployment of CSC projects also faces barriers. First, regulatory conditions can constrain the implementation of these projects. Secondly, CSC projects show a high organisational complexity, b trying to gather multiple and diversified end-users. The report proposes solutions for the barriers restricting the emergence of this model.