New publication from the BlueBird project team!

We're excited to share our latest paper: "Quantifying the regulatory impact on Renewable Energy Community performance in Austria and Spain", now published in Energy Policy (Fina, Ribó-Pérez & Manso-Burgos, 2026), written by Bernadette Fina from AIT as first author.

What we did

Using a "put in the shoes" approach, we simulated a typical Austrian and a typical Spanish Renewable Energy Community (REC) — and then swapped their regulatory frameworks, so each REC was modelled under the other country's rules. This isolates the pure impact of national legislation on REC performance, based on energy, economic and ecological KPIs.

Key findings

• 🇦🇹 Austria's framework — which allows "behind-the-meter" self-consumption before sharing surplus energy within the community — drives higher self-sufficiency and self-consumption rates.
• 🇪🇸 Spain's framework — which fully exempts shared energy from grid charges — leads to significantly higher economic viability for RECs.
• 👉 Neither approach is simply "better": both reflect different regulatory philosophies and trade-offs that matter for future EU-wide harmonisation of Renewable and Citizen Energy Community legislation.

Why it matters for BlueBird

Understanding how regulation shapes the value of shared and flexible energy resources is central to BlueBird's mission of unlocking energy flexibility from buildings and enabling their competitive participation in energy markets (TSOs, DSOs, aggregators) across Europe.

📄 Read the full paper (open access)