The severe drought of summer 2026 underlined that energy security and climate change are intertwined challenges. The Danube fell to near-record low levels, which significantly constrained output at the Paks nuclear power plant and forced water restrictions in many regions. Those events highlighted the vulnerability of large, centralized energy systems to increasingly frequent extreme weather.
Against this backdrop, energy communities are being seen not just as climate or social initiatives but as building blocks for decentralized, resilient local energy systems that can lower grid stress and better adapt to future climate extremes.
Three decades of evolution: from shared PV to system coordination
Over the past thirty years the trajectory of energy communities is clear: the first generation built shared renewable assets; the second focused on local energy sharing; today a new phase is emerging in which communities coordinate whole local energy systems.
There are economic reasons for this shift: with the rapid spread of renewables and changes in electricity markets, pure generation provides diminishing added value. The most successful initiatives therefore act as integrated energy service providers — organizing local generation and storage, electric mobility, energy-efficiency investments, consumer flexibility and digital control.
A concrete example is the Belgian cooperative Ecopower: today it not only produces renewable electricity but also offers energy-efficiency advice, participates in heat projects, supports battery developments and integrates consumer flexibility and electromobility.
Flexibility as a new source of value: aggregation and markets
As renewable output and consumption become less synchronous, flexibility — the ability of generation, storage and consumption to adapt to system needs — gains importance. Energy communities can act as aggregators, coordinating members’ batteries, electric vehicles and other flexible loads to offer controllable capacity to system operators or distribution network operators.
In the Netherlands several local flexibility initiatives have started in recent years, partly because connection capacities have hit limits in many areas. In the UK the Piclo Flex platform creates a marketplace for flexibility services, and many distribution network operators procure local flexibility through it.
Flexibility becomes a standalone revenue stream: communities can be remunerated for services that support system stability, and this value is expected to grow as renewables expand.
The ESCO route: energy efficiency as a service
Beyond timing optimization, the ESCO model asks how to deliver the same comfort with less energy. Energy communities can organize, finance and implement building retrofits, heat pumps and smart control systems.
Such measures reduce members’ energy bills, increase local renewable utilization and improve sharing efficiency. They also create additional revenue streams for communities — development, operation or advisory fees — provided there is accurate measurement and transparent contracting.
Digital platforms and AI: the community’s ‘brain’
Effective local markets and coordination require digital platforms able to ingest smart-meter data in real time, track production and consumption, optimize storage, control EV charging, compute sharing allocations, settle transactions among members and interface with aggregators, traders and network operators. These platforms become the operational brain of an energy community.
Digitization has also turned data into a resource. With appropriate data governance and privacy safeguards, operational data enables optimizations that increase self-consumption, reduce peak loads and make local storage use more efficient.
The next step is artificial intelligence. AI-powered energy management systems can forecast production and demand, factor in weather forecasts, analyze consumption patterns and automatically optimize the local system. Decisions are made in seconds, processing volumes of data impossible for manual control. AI thus acts as a decision-support and automation tool for communities rather than a replacement.
European direction and the Hungarian context
European energy policy increasingly supports decentralized systems where local communities become active system management partners. The development of flexibility markets, the rollout of smart meters, data-driven control and new digital platforms all point in that direction.
In Hungary the regulatory and market environment currently concentrates on practical implementation of energy sharing, but it is important to design domestic initiatives now so they can integrate energy service, flexibility and efficiency functions later. In the long run the most successful communities are likely to be those that can coordinate local resources — energy, data, storage and loads — as a single, coherent system, not those with the largest PV capacity.
Upcoming industry forum
On 8 September 2026 the Portfolio Sustainable World 2026 conference will address current topics including renewable energy, network development and wind power.
The evolution of energy communities shows that community energy has moved well beyond shared solar parks: the first generation created shared ownership, the second learned to match production and consumption, and the current phase focuses on intelligent coordination of entire local energy systems. The institutional role and digital coordination capabilities will determine future competitive advantage.
