The growing penetration of distributed energy resources is opening up opportunities for local energy management (LEM) – the coordination of decentralized energy supply, storage, transport, conversion and consumption within a given geographical area. Because European electricity market liberalization concentrates competition at the wholesale level, local energy management at the distribution level is likely to impose new roles and responsibilities on existing and/or new actors. This paper provides insights into the appropriateness of organizational models for flexibility management to guarantee retail competition and feasibility for upscaling. By means of a new analytical framework three projects in the Netherlands and one in Germany have been analysed. Both the local aggregator and dynamic pricing projects present potentials for retail competition and feasibility of upscaling in Europe

Integrated Community Energy Systems (ICES) are an emerging local energy system focusing on the collective use of distributed energy resources (DER). These socio-technical systems (STSs) have a high potential to advance the transition towards socially inclusive, environmentally-friendly energy systems and to stimulate the local economy. While there is an analogy between energy in ICES and other common goods such as natural resources, it is not clear to what extent the existing theoretical framework for Socio-ecological Systems (SES) on the commons accounts for the specificities of common resources in ICESs and other STSs. This research explores the applicability of the SES framework to energy commons that are firmly embedded in STS with reference to the DE Ramplaan ICES in the Netherlands. The formation process and governance characteristics of this ICES are revised, further aided by stakeholder interviews. A framework and a strategic plan that can be used to design and implement an ICES are proposed.

Integrated community energy systems (ICESs) are emerging as a modern development to re-organize local energy systems allowing simultaneous integration of distributed energy resources (DERs) and engagement of local communities. Although local energy initiatives, such as ICESs are rapidly emerging due to community objectives, such as cost and emission reductions as well as resiliency, assessment and evaluation are still lacking on the value that these systems can provide both to the local communities as well as to the whole energy system. In this paper, we present a model-based framework to assess the value of ICESs for the local communities. The distributed energy resources-consumer adoption model (DER-CAM) based ICES model is used to assess the value of an ICES in the Netherlands. For the considered community size and local conditions, grid-connected ICESs are already beneficial to the alternative of solely being supplied from the grid both in terms of total energy costs and CO₂ emissions, whereas grid-defected systems, although performing very well in terms of CO₂ emission reduction, are still rather expensive.