Crash course 7: Community participation in the European electricity markets

Energy communities have been empowering citizen mainly through awareness raising, energy
coaching, and organising collective ownership projects and group purchases, but they can do so much more and there is still a lot of unexplored potential concerning new market roles and activities. The current regulatory framework and market design, however, still make it very challenging for these communities to ‘do more’ and exploit new market opportunities, especially because of high complexity of both technical systems and markets and regulations.

This crash course guides energy communities through the current European electricity markets with the aim to inform them on how these markets are organised and which markets could be relevant for their community activities. Seven markets are described in detail:

• Power purchase agreement (PPA) markets
• Wholesale (spot/futures) markets
• Retail markets
• Balancing markets
• Congestion markets
• Peer-to-peer markets
• Capacity markets

The crash course is the seventh module of a series of crash courses created by the cVPP project. The other available modules are:

• Crash course 1: What is a cVPP?
• Crash course 2: History of our energy system
• Crash course 3: EU energy policy
• Crash course 4: Energy flexibility
• Crash course 5: Energy market roles
• Crash course 6: Community engagement in practice
• Crash course 8: Energy Management Systems for energy communities