On May 28th and 29th we held our 8th GO-P2P meeting in collaboration with NOVA School of Law and NOVA IMS Information Management School in Lisbon, Portugal.
Thanks to our speakers Filipe Neves da Silva (EDP), Luisa Matos (Cleanwatts) Pepijn van de Water and Sjoerd Doumen (ENTRNCE International) and Jeremy Harrison (LCP Delta) for providing detailed insights into their projects and for openly discussing the current challenges they face in scaling up local energy markets.
Key takeaways from this meeting included:
1. Supportive regulation: The lack of supportive regulation is still limiting the scale of these market models and is a key barrier to making the system replicable. We need a supportive regulatory environment to ensure the uptake of these schemes.
2. Linking financial transactions to energy flows: Very few projects have yet linked financial transactions to energy flows in a way that maximises collective self-consumption. Until they do, they risk exacerbating rather than alleviating grid constraints.
3. Metering infrastructure: In many countries there is a lack of billing-grade metering infrastructure, both within site boundaries and on the grid, that can support and verify metered volumes in trading arrangements.
4. High quality data and smart devices: Implementing these dynamic local market models will require high-quality, high-resolution data, together with smart-enabled devices, high-quality metering assets and privacy-preserving data-sharing protocols to both protect and enable household benefits.