Implementation Process of a Local Energy Community in Portugal – The Case of Culatra Island

This work describes the challenges to create a local energy community at Culatra Island, a small coastal community located in the south of Portugal. Although the creation of local energy communities is recently possible in Portugal after the transposition of the EU directive to the national law, there are no real case studies to follow. The study starts by describing the Portuguese legal framework for these communities, including the defined energy sharing methodologies. Subsequently, it researches into the specific context of Culatra Island, exploring both consumption patterns and renewable energy production. The aim is to propose an energy sharing scheme that prioritizes energy costs reduction for the community while increasing the energy sustainability of island, ensuring fairness and proportionality among the community members. A new economic model is proposed to maximize consumption of locally produced energy, demonstrating how members can simultaneously benefit from discounts on energy bills and invest on increasing future production and energy self-sufficiency. The model will guarantee greater savings for the members during a temporary horizon of decades and can be further replicated on other local energy communities with different social, economic and environmental conditions.