Energy communities in the energy transition

Abstract

Energy communities are no longer peripheral experiments in Europe but central actors in the energy transition. Their growth and institutionalization is particularly observable in the Dutch context. By 2024, 702 cooperatives engaged over 139,000 members across nearly 90% of municipalities - evidence that the energy transition is societal as much as technical. In the Dutch context, communities can accelerate and democratise change by raising acceptance of renewable energy projects, mobilising local capital and building energy literacy and trust. The Netherlands is a uniquely fertile testbed for integrating bottom-up change: a polycentric governance setting, a dense cooperative ecosystem, rapid digitalisation and high distributed generation all push communities beyond renewable energy deployment towards new activities, such as storage and demand-side flexibility. Yet, practice still outpaces legal, policy and technical frameworks. Unresolved tensions in regulation, legitimacy, justice, impact evaluation, system integration, and scaling reveal that energy communities remain under-leveraged. This perspective advances a research agenda to close that gap, co-created with Energie Samen, the Dutch federation of energy communities, and informed by targeted literature synthesis, roundtables, and practitioner interviews, to pinpoint where knowledge is most urgently needed to align rules and markets with citizen-led innovation. While our perspective is focused on the Netherlands, the lessons are transposable if contextualized to other legal, market and social conditions. Accordingly, we suggest that without deliberate coordination between research, policy, and practice, the potential of energy communities will be left on the table just when it matters most.