With the Clean Energy for all Europeans legislative package, the European Union (EU) aimed to put consumers “at the heart” of EU energy policy. The recast of the Renewable Energy Directive (RED II) acknowledged the importance of energy communities for the energy transition and introduced new provisions for renewable energy communities (RECs), empowering them to participate in the energy market. This article analyses the progress of transposing and implementing key provisions of the RED II that apply to RECs in nine European countries and focuses on timeliness and completeness of transposition. It comprises both a qualitative and quantitative assessment covering (1) the definition, rights, and market activities of RECs; (2) key elements of enabling frameworks; and (3) consideration of REC specificities in support schemes for renewable energy. The analysis shows considerable variation in transposition performance between the analysed countries. The authors investigate the reasons for this variation and relate them to findings of European implementation and compliance research. Key factors identified include actor-related and capacity-related factors, institutional fit, and characteristics of the RED II itself. Future research in this field needs multi-faceted avenues and should pay particular attention to the influence of national governments and incumbents, not only in the transposition process, but already in upstream policy formulation at the European level.

Energy communities (ECs), intended as collective action initiatives in the energy field involving citizens’ participation, have been gaining relevance for the past decades as an alternative way to organize the energy chain to challenge the incumbent system. With Europe’s recently adopted Clean Energy Package, ECs found a formal recognition by the European Union as potential actors of the transition of the energy system towards a wider and more decentralized use of renewable sources. Although the potential role of ECs in the transition is therefore hardly questionable, a thorough comprehension of the enabling factors that might foster their diffusion and scaling up is still lacking. Through a comparative analysis of the evolutionary trajectories in six EU countries regarding their energy systems, their regulatory frameworks and their historical evolution of ECs, namely through the example of cooperative models, this paper aims at providing some preliminary evidence about the factors and dynamics that seem to have played, and may play, a role in hampering or facilitating EC model diffusion. Attention is therefore specifically paid to three dimensions of analysis referring to: the energy mix and market structure; the institutional and policy landscape; the wider social attitudes towards environmental issues and cooperation among citizens. In addition to providing a wide comparison of different EU countries, the paper shows that the historical evolution pathways have to be carefully taken into account to understand what might trigger ECs exploitation in the EU.

In this article, we take stock of the findings from conceptual and empirical work on the role of transition initiatives for accelerating transitions as input for modeling acceleration dynamics. We applied the qualitative modeling approach of causal loop diagrams to capture the dynamics of a single transition initiative evolving within its regional context. In doing so, we aim to address two key challenges in transition modeling, namely conceptualization, and the framing of empirical insights obtained for various case study regions in a consistent modeling framework. Our results show that through this systematic approach one can translate conceptual and qualitative empirical work into a transition model design. Moreover, the causal loop diagrams can be used as discussion tools to support dialogue among researchers and stakeholders, and may support a comparison of transition dynamics across case-study regions. We reflect on main limitations related to empirical model validation (lack of data) and to model structure (high level of aggregation), and describe next steps for moving from a qualitative single transition initiative to a quantitative multiple transition initiatives model.