Virardi Unpacking Electricity Market Design Reform Energy Sharing (2026)

Full citation: Virardi, E. “Unpacking the Electricity Market Design Reform: The Introduction of the Right to ‘Energy Sharing’.” European Papers, Vol. 11, No. 2 (2026), pp. 1035–1049. doi: 10.15166/2499-8249/901.

Open access: Published under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 by European Papers, an EU law journal (the raw text does not itself state its peer-review status).

Summary

A doctrinal EU-law journal article analyzing the “energy sharing” right introduced by the Electricity Market Design Reform (Directive (EU) 2024/1711, Art. 15a) — situating it within the broader EU energy-transition legal architecture (European Green Deal, Digital Decade, Clean Industrial Deal) rather than adding new operational detail. The wiki already has more granular, operationally-focused coverage of Art. 15a itself (thresholds, actors, Swedish transposition) via Source - Electricity Market Design Reform Directive (EU 2024-1711) and Energy Communities; this source’s distinctive contribution is conceptual/theoretical rather than factual.

Key claims

Energy sharing vs. peer-to-peer trading — a legal distinction

The article draws a clean conceptual line the wiki did not previously articulate explicitly:

• Peer-to-peer (P2P) trading: participants remain distinct market actors exchanging electricity through price-governed contractual transactions — reproduces the logic of a supply relationship, just decentralized.
• Energy sharing: not centered on the sale of electricity between separate market actors. It is collective self-consumption among active customers who own, lease, rent, or otherwise control the generation/storage assets involved — electricity flows are an allocation within a shared arrangement, not a market exchange, even when a price changes hands between participants.

Before the 2024 reform, this distinction was legally blurry; the reform’s explicit Art. 15a definition (self-consumption of renewable electricity, generated/stored on- or off-site, owned/leased/rented or transferred by another active customer) resolves the ambiguity.

Energy sharing as a general right, not just a community activity

Under the earlier Clean Energy for All Europeans package, energy sharing existed only indirectly, embedded in Renewable/Citizen Energy Community (REC/CEC) provisions — an internally-oriented activity of collective entities, not an autonomous right. The 2024 reform extends it into a general right exercisable by households, SMEs, and public bodies (Member States may extend further), independent of forming a formal energy community — via private contract or a dedicated legal entity, optionally through a third-party organiser who may own/manage up to 6 MW of generation/storage without being classified as an active customer.

Energy justice framing

The article applies a three-part energy-justice lens (not previously used elsewhere in this wiki) to assess energy sharing’s social implications:

• Distributive justice — fairer cost/benefit allocation; energy sharing can reduce energy poverty via access to cheaper local renewable electricity
• Procedural justice — inclusiveness/transparency of decision-making; energy sharing as a democratizing mechanism for energy governance
• Recognition justice — fair representation of vulnerable groups; the article notes participation may require resources (capital, technical access) unevenly distributed across households, risking benefits concentrating among already-advantaged participants absent support measures

Relevance to the wiki

• Energy Communities — adds the P2P-trading-vs-energy-sharing conceptual distinction, useful for disambiguating the two mechanisms where the existing page discusses both
• No changes needed to the existing transposition-timeline, threshold, or Swedish-implementation content already documented via the Directive source page and Prop. 2025/26:240 coverage — this article adds framing, not new facts

Data gaps

• The article is purely doctrinal/legal analysis — it does not address implementation outcomes, uptake data, or empirical evidence of energy sharing’s distributive effects anywhere in the EU; no data gap is opened here since this was never in this source’s scope