Forming a Local Market using a Virtual Energy Community

In the future energy system, a new energy market design and framework is required to incentivize a high share of prosumers, who consume, store, and produce energy. In order to support active prosumers, the European Union (EU), in directives of "Clean Energy for all Europeans" package, provides the basic requirements to form an energy community (EC). However, this package does not include any particular architecture. In this regard, this paper will review the main articles of the EU directives in terms of the EC and investigate the EC structure suggested by Finnish regulation to identify the barriers of forming an optimum EC. Finally, this paper proposes an efficient structure to form a local market based on a virtual energy community using the existing grid operators.