Community Energy for enhancing the energy transition

In the transition process towards renewable energy systems, the way to involve final users in the energy production is still complex. Although many steps forward have been made by Community Energy (CE) around the world and especially in the European Uniion (EU), there are still many entry obstacles that do not allow a revolution in the energy market. After presenting the state of the art on the development of Community Energy in Europe, the main features of community energy have been explored in this paper. This work reports a complete overview of the current perception of Community Energy among people, analyzing the vision that a possible end user could have in approaching this innovative system of energy sharing. To achieve this goal, the paper presents the results of a survey, with the aim of studying how people can be more involved in the energy market and how they could have access to community energy. The outcomes show how people needs should be considered, in order to increase awareness and control over the energy that they consume for better development of future community energy. The current weaknesses and shortcomings in the diffusion of communities are also analyzed, and some suggestions and discussions are made on how to overcome these limitations.