VIENNA – Across the European Union, a fundamental shift in power dynamics is unfolding, as the centuries-old model of centralized electricity distribution gives way to “Energy Communities”-localized, bottom-up networks that allow citizens to produce and trade power independently of national utilities.
This transition represents a pivot toward decentralized energy sovereignty, arriving at a critical juncture for Europe as it seeks to decouple from volatile global fossil fuel markets and meet the stringent decarbonization targets set by the European Green Deal. By transforming passive consumers into “prosumers,” these communities are restructuring the economics of the grid, moving electricity from a top-down commodity to a peer-to-peer asset.
Lorena Skiljan, the CEO and founder of Nobile, is at the forefront of this systemic change. A former lawyer and energy management specialist who previously led product development for Austria’s largest utility, Skiljan identified a critical inefficiency in how local renewable energy was being handled. During a research project in Vienna’s Viertel 2 district, she developed an “energy sandbox” that proved consumers could buy electricity directly from local producers, bypassing the traditional utility middleman and exposing how much value was being lost in the legacy system.
“Energy communities are the next big thing on the energy market,” Skiljan stated in a recent discussion with The Energy Bridge, a network dedicated to bridging the energy ecosystems of Central and Eastern Europe with Western Europe.
The friction in the current system is primarily financial. Traditionally, a homeowner with solar panels must sell excess energy back to a utility at a low wholesale rate, while their neighbor purchases that same energy from the utility at a significant premium. Nobile functions as a digital intermediary to eliminate this gap and keep more of the economic benefit within the local community.
“Think of the energy market like the travel industry. In the old way, if you wanted a holiday, you went to a large travel agency (The Utility). In the new way, you use a platform like Booking.com to connect directly with the apartment owner.”
The platform manages the technical complexity of this trade, utilizing APIs to communicate with Distribution System Operators (DSOs) and tracking electricity in 15-minute intervals. This precision allows for the generation of monthly bills, which Skiljan notes is the non-negotiable requirement for the model to function: “What you need is an electricity bill… on the monthly basis. If you can’t provide that, you just can’t run the model.” In regulatory terms, that billing capability is what turns a neighborhood experiment into a market-compliant energy service.
Diversification and the end of NIMBYism
While rooftop solar is the most visible entry point for energy communities, Skiljan argues that relying solely on photovoltaics creates a “bad load curve” due to the intermittency of sunlight. To ensure grid resilience, Nobile utilizes a portfolio approach, pooling diverse assets including wind, hydro, and solar and matching them as closely as possible to local consumption patterns.
This diversification strategy has an unexpected geopolitical and social benefit: the mitigation of “Not In My Backyard” (NIMBY) sentiment around new infrastructure. In several Austrian municipalities, local opposition to wind parks vanished once residents were integrated into a community model. When residents receive direct, cheaper power from the specific turbine visible from their window, the perceived nuisance of the infrastructure is replaced by a tangible economic benefit and a sense of local ownership in the energy transition.
The economic incentives for joining these communities are driven by three primary factors:
- Grid Fee Reduction: In Austria, members can save up to 60% on grid fees because the electricity is consumed locally and does not traverse the national high-voltage network, easing congestion on infrastructure that is expensive to maintain and upgrade.
- Tax Exemptions: Participants often pay zero electricity taxes on energy shared within the local community, reflecting a policy choice to reward local consumption of renewable power.
- Price Negotiation: Consumers negotiate prices directly with asset owners, often securing rates between 7 and 9 cents per kWh, compared to utility rates that can exceed 14 cents, creating a visible household-level dividend from participation.
This shift necessitates a change in the role of the DSO. While Skiljan acknowledges the natural monopoly of physical infrastructure, she argues the DSO must evolve into a neutral, regulated data provider. In this framework, the operator supplies verified data on how much energy came from a local asset versus the national grid, enabling the split-billing and settlement required for decentralized markets and giving regulators an auditable trail of flows and fees.
Scaling across the European Union
The model is now targeting Germany, where demand from small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and municipalities has surged following the passage of new energy-sharing laws. This expansion aligns with the European Union’s Renewable Energy Directive (RED II), which mandates that member states provide a legal framework for “Renewable Energy Communities” and “Citizen Energy Communities” to ensure citizens can participate in and benefit from the energy transition.
RED II, together with the Internal Market for Electricity rules, effectively turns energy communities from pilot projects into a recognized actor in the European power system. National regulators are required to transpose these provisions into domestic law, determine how grid charges are applied, and decide how far communities can go in aggregating demand and negotiating directly with generators-questions that will shape how quickly models like Nobile’s can scale beyond early adopters.
However, the scalability of the bottom-up model depends heavily on infrastructure flexibility. When discussing the allocation of significant investment into the transition, Skiljan emphasizes that the current bottleneck is not generation, but storage.
“Storage, storage, storage… Energy storage,” she emphasizes. “Then I don’t need any thermal assets or nuclears because then I don’t need that baseload power plants. I need flexibility.” Behind that statement lies a policy challenge: permitting, funding, and integrating batteries and other storage technologies fast enough to smooth out the volatility of distributed renewables while maintaining system reliability.
As AI-driven data centers and the mass adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) continue to increase total electricity demand, the “energy cake” is expanding. This growth creates a market where traditional utility giants and decentralized matchmakers can coexist, provided the regulatory environment continues to shift toward openness and data transparency. For policymakers, that means deciding who can see and use granular consumption data, under what conditions, and how to protect consumers while allowing new entrants to innovate on top of the grid.
The European Commission continues to monitor the implementation of the Internal Market for Electricity Directive, which seeks to further remove barriers to the creation of these citizen-led energy cooperatives across all member states. The way national energy regulators interpret those provisions-on data access, grid tariffs, and community rights-will determine whether energy communities remain niche experiments or become a mainstream pillar of Europe’s decarbonized power system.
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