Legal and Policy

Electricity Sharing In Different Countries

Source: Frank Bold

Community energy and electricity sharing vary from country to country. The main purpose of these schemes are for the members of the community to be able to cover their electricity needs, but also incentivise the concurrence of production and consumption of energy among the members, so that the energy is not lost.

Below are some examples of the sharing schemes that South European countries use.

Greece

Electricity sharing takes the form of virtual net metering. Consumption does not happen in real-time. Instead, the electricity produced is shared with the national grid and the production-to-consumption balance is calculated on a monthly billing basis.

Example of how virtual net metering works: At the end of a set period (usually each month), the total amount of electricity generated by the community’s project is measured. If an EC member has a 5% share in that RE project, 5% of the electricity produced by the generation plant is deducted from the total amount of electricity consumed and the member pays the supplier only for the remaining amount of electricity consumed.

Italy

Electricity sharing uses feed-in tariffs, not sharing as defined by EU legislation. Feed-in tariffs are a policy instrument to support investments in RES.

Feed-in tariffs are designed to provide a fixed-price incentive to guarantee a certain benefit for each unit of electricity produced over a long-term contract, typically 10 to 25 years. Today, feed-in tariffs are being phased out as renewable electricity is already fully competitive and its development does not need to be incentivised in this way.

Portugal

Electricity sharing is done through collective self-consumption scheme or renewable energy community (CER – Comunidade de Energia Renovável). The electricity generated is allocated to the points of consumption at 15-minute intervals and is then deducted from the customer’s consumption in their monthly bill.