The EU Directive 2018/2001 – RED II, focused on the use of energy from renewable sources, together with the EU Directive 2019/944 – EMI, focused on the integration of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) into energy markets, aims to give a central role to DERs and demand flexibility. However, the structure of traditional energy markets seems to be poorly suited to future energy scenarios, which foresee a greater spread of distributed generation and an increase in electricity demand from end users.

In this context, Local Energy Markets (LEM) have experienced increased interest in recent years, proving to be an appropriate tool to respond to the future challenges of energy markets and the increased demand for flexibility. LEM are defined as the place where small consumers, producers and prosumer can exchange energy with each other, through the creation of a competitive market and the balancing of energy supply and demand at the local level (i.e., within a portion of the distribution network).

In particular, peer-to-peer (P2P) energy exchange has emerged as a new alternative to promote the deployment of DERs: it allows direct interaction between market participants without considering the involvement of third parties. This document aims to list and describe the main characteristics of the various LEM configurations through a bibliographic analysis.

The description of LEM projects was conducted by classifying them according to the following attributes: type of transactions done, market bidding period, market pricing mechanism, type and number of market participants. The analysis carried out has shown that in the literature there is not a single formulation of the local market able to be integrated perfectly with the current regulatory framework; this aspect will represent the starting point for the next studies.

Although the degree of maturity of LEM does not yet allow its robust and reliable exploitation on a large scale, LEM are opening up innovative perspectives, for a more efficient and fair management of energy supply at the local level.

The document is available on the site in Italian