Community Energy Literature Review

This post will draw on three papers published this year which are all concerned with the role of locally based energy projects in the transition towards net zero. The first discusses the situation in the UK; the second addresses the wider European picture; and the third concentrates on community energy in Portugal. Each paper covers a range of issues, but here the focus will be on the importance of community engagement and how to promote and evaluate it. UK energy projects Gupta, Zahiri and Gregg (2026) consider three kinds of project in the UK: community energy, local energy, and smart local energy systems; their study suggests ways in which the effectiveness of such projects can be improved. The differences between projects described by the terms community energy, local energy, and smart local energy systems can be loosely summed up as follows. Community energy projects are typically owned and controlled by members of a local community and aim to benefit the community. They oft...

Market framework for local energy trading: a review of potential designs and market clearing approaches Mohsen Khorasany, Yateendra Mishra, and Gerard Ledwich, 2018, IET Generation, Transmission & Distribution This review paper contains over a hundred references to various aspects of its topic, and the principal aim of this post is to identify those which are at present available on open access. The paper is presented in the following sections, each of which is followed here by the reference numbers in the original. Introduction [2, 6, 7, 8] Local Energy Trading [17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23] Market Players [47, 63, 72, 73, 78, 89] Optimization objective [37, 38, 50, 51, 52, 53, 60, 72, 73, 78, 90] Overview of different market clearing approaches [98, 99, 100, 102, 103, 105, 106, 108, 109] Discussion and analysis [112] Conclusions and future works References: [2] A tale of two visions: Designing a decentralized tr...

'Refactoring Energy Systems' is a research fellowship related to the HoSEM project described in an earlier post. Its grant application details can be viewed at http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk/NGBOViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/R007373/1 In brief, the fellowship aims to transform how the energy system is viewed, managed and evolved: moving away from the current perception of a single, uniform system across the whole of the UK, to that of localised, adaptive, largely self-reliant system-of-systems. In this new setting, the local systems will each be individually optimised, yet globally connected. To enable this locally optimised and globally connected energy system, the fellowship will deliver a set of system refactoring patterns, tools, and techniques. Refactoring is a disciplined approach to gradually changing the internal structure of an existing system without changing its externally useful services.  The project runs from 2017 to 2022.