Energy Communities Overview: Managerial Policies, Economic Aspects, Technologies, and Models

Recently, there has been an ongoing global debate on the issues of energy safety, energy autonomy, and energy alleviation policies in developed and developing countries. The energy communities can integrate distributed energy resources, especially among local energy systems, playing a decisive role to support people around the world in the transition process towards sustainable development and renewable energy sources (RES). The main research dimensions of such a manifold approach are environmental sustainability, the reduction of greenhouse gases (GHGs) emission, the ordinal exploitation of RES, the social awareness in actions towards global consumerism in an environmentally caring manner, the increase of energy efficiency, and the pollution relief caused by the expansion of urban/built environment worldwide. This review study focused on the roles and the ways of how “energy communities” (ECs) could support contemporary energy management and priorities to ensure energy safety, autonomy, and alleviation, regionally and globally. In this context, a systematic, last-decade publications of ECs was conducted and the retrieved documents were organized in alignment with the following four groups of literature overview. Group 1 covered the dimensions of technology and environment, being coupled with Group 2, covering the dimensions of socio-culture and anthropocentricity (mainly focusing on the built environment). A similar coupling of Group 3 and Group 4 was made, where Group 3 covered the legislative dimension of ECs and Group 4 covered the ECs devoted to Europe–European Union (EU), respectively. The emerging key literature aspects, the proposed measures, and the applied energy policies on ECs were also conveyed and discussed.