How can we make it easier for people and local communities to produce, share and trade their own energy?
This is one of the questions behind a new joint policy brief developed within the BRIDGE initiative, bringing together six EU-funded projects, including INTELLIGENT.
The policy brief, “Recommendations to Empower Citizens in the Energy Transition Thanks to Energy Communities and Energy Sharing,” turns lessons from EU research and demonstration projects into practical recommendations for policymakers. Its goal is simple: to help create better conditions for citizens and energy communities to take a more active role in Europe’s energy system.
BRIDGE is a European Commission initiative that brings together Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe projects working on smart grids, energy storage and digitalisation. It gives projects a space to exchange experiences, discuss common challenges and bring their findings closer to European policy discussions.
INTELLIGENT is actively involved in this collaboration. The project participates in the BRIDGE Regulation Working Group through consortium partner smartEn, while R2M Spain represents INTELLIGENT in the Consumer and Citizen Engagement Working Group.
This means that the experience gained through INTELLIGENT does not stay within the project. It can also contribute to wider discussions about how Europe’s energy rules should evolve as new technologies and new ways of sharing and trading energy emerge.
Energy communities allow citizens, local authorities and businesses to work together to produce, consume, store and share renewable energy. Peer-to-peer energy trading can take this a step further by allowing locally generated electricity to be traded between participants.
But technology alone is not enough. Existing rules and procedures can make it difficult for these new models to work in practice.
To address these challenges, LocalRES, FEDECOM, Masterpiece, STUNNED, INTELLIGENT and U2DEMO joined forces to develop the policy brief. Together, they propose 11 recommendations for policymakers at European, national and local levels.
The recommendations call for:
One recommendation has a particularly strong connection with the work of INTELLIGENT: Recommendation 2 – creating clearer rules for advanced energy sharing and trading.
INTELLIGENT is developing solutions that can help people and energy communities trade locally generated energy. But for these solutions to work in the real world, regulation also needs to keep up.
The policy brief specifically refers to INTELLIGENT and FEDECOM as projects developing advanced approaches for trading energy within and between communities. It highlights the need for rules that are flexible enough to support market-based energy trading rather than limiting communities to simpler, predefined energy-sharing models.
In practice, this could mean allowing energy to be shared across a wider local area, giving communities more flexibility in how locally generated energy is priced and shared, and allowing energy allocation to better reflect how much electricity people actually produce and use at different times.
For citizens, the idea behind these recommendations is straightforward: make local energy sharing easier, more flexible and better suited to real-life needs.
The joint policy brief shows how collaboration between EU-funded projects can turn practical experience into recommendations that go beyond individual projects.
By working together through BRIDGE, LocalRES, FEDECOM, Masterpiece, STUNNED, INTELLIGENT and U2DEMO are helping bring the lessons learned from research and demonstration activities into wider discussions about the future of energy communities in Europe.
For INTELLIGENT, this is also an important part of the bigger picture: developing new digital solutions is only one side of the challenge. Creating the right conditions for people and communities to actually use them is equally important.
Read the full policy brief: Recommendations to Empower Citizens in the Energy Transition Thanks to Energy Communities and Energy Sharing.
