Facilitating the Energy Transition—The Governance Role of Local Renewable Energy Cooperatives

Local communities are increasingly taking active roles and emerging as new actors in the energy system. Community energy and energy storage may enable effective energy system integration and get maximum benefits of local generation leading to more flexible and resilient energy supply systems, and playing an important role in achieving renewable energy and climate policy objectives. The central role of citizens is also reflected in recent EU policy. The clean energy for all package of European Union through the 2018 recast of the European Renewable Energy Directive (RED II) and the 2019 recast of the Electricity Market Directive (EMD II) which defines and promotes renewable
energy communities and citizen energy communities, respectively. These developments prompted the Universities of Groningen and Twente to organize an international conference on New Pathways for Community Energy and Storage from 6-7 June 2019 in Groningen. In this book, we summarize the different topics covered in this international conference in the form of the 14 articles published in this special issue on the same topic. Both the special issue and the conference aimed at addressing
important developments and challenges related to local energy transitions and the role of community energy and energy storage therein. Based on the contributions to the conference and this issue several conclusions can be drawn. We suggest experimenting with new storage technologies, such as more
sustainable electric and thermal storage systems, and introducing new types of modelling which are closely connected to real-world experiments. In addition, we advise to conduct more comparative
studies, to see what kinds of community energy and community energy storage work in different contexts and what can be learned from new approaches, such as regulatory sandboxes for energy
initiatives or combined community ownership models for various energy technologies. We think adaption of national policy, legislation and technology-society interactions is required to enable community energy and community energy storage. One of the key questions is how to combine energy transition and stakeholders involvement in such a way that issues such as access to energy, citizens empowerment and energy poverty are addressed.