Professor Birgitte Bak-Jensen from Aalborg University outlines how EU projects will help to establish local energy communities, ensuring carbon neutrality by intelligently controlling the local production and usage of green energy.

Local citizens must be engaged in the future green energy transition no matter where they are situated in the world. In addition, research should focus not only on technical solutions, but crucially it must identify how to ensure user involvement and adoption of any new technologies and social innovations.

The new solutions should be seen in a holistic perspective, where the concrete technical solutions are implemented, whilst also considering the human, social, market, regulatory and environmental aspects. Such an approach will ensure realistic solutions, which are welcomed and easily accommodated by the citizens.

In general, households account for around one-fourth of the final energy consumption in Europe and around one fifth of the gross inland energy consumption. Out of this, nearly two thirds are for heating, of which renewables today only account for a quarter. It is, therefore, essential to make the overall households’ energy consumption, and especially the heating, greener, carbon neutral and more energy efficient, if we are to be able to achieve the UN’s climate goals.

One of the foreseen methods is to form local energy communities with flexible energy consumption adapted to the actual production of renewable power, no matter if it is produced locally or globally.

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