The EU legal framework: know your energy rights!
About
Over the past years, the EU has done incredible work on putting the citizen at the heart of the energy transition. Much of that might not be very known by people who are ouside of the “Brussels” bubble. Or, worse, it is drowned in a sea of EU-sceptic fake news.
Adopted in 2019, the Clean Energy For All Europeans Package intended to increase the number of players in the energy market. That is why the EU gave citizens, SMEs and municipalities the right to produce, store, share, sell and consume energy. It also provided thousands of existing citizen energy initiatives with definitions and provisions for: “renewable energy communities” in the Renewable Energy Directive II and “citizen energy communities” in the revised Internal Market for Electricity Directive (EMD). Art.15a of this 2024 reformed EMD explicitly states a focus on energy sharing.
Why should you bother?
The better you understand the principles of those European guidelines, the better you will be able to ask your own national government for the right policies. Each Member State is meant to transpose the European Directives into national law – and that is your chance!
Recognizing the important role of local actors in the energy transition process – citizens in particular – the EU’s Clean Energy Package includes provisions to help local communities take ownership of the energy transition through the concept of energy communities.
And still, when zooming into the Member States and listening to pilots such as Gabrovo, Zagreb or Limassol, we note that regulatory uncertainty and a lack of tailored incentives often favor large-scale corporate players over citizen-led initiatives, undermining the principles of the Clean Energy Package.
Learn more about how community energy is anchored in EU law and how your own government could make certain steps easier for citizen-led energy. The free and short Espresso training for civil servants, that focuses on exactly those basics in Module 1, is available in different languages. The next English course will start in March 2025.
