*3.2. The Energy Community Lifecycle*

Based on the case studies and reviews, the EC lifecycle can be broadly split into five phases: initiation, design and implementation, operation and further development meaning either social, or technological scaling (Figure 13) [14,35,49,52,87,89–100].

**Figure 13.** Overview of the generalized energy community project lifecycle.

EC initiation involves defining the overall strategy for the EC, namely an analysis of the characteristics of the area, the local energy sources, the users and of the community itself [35]. As for the energy context, the strategy of the EC is mostly defined by the varying energy load curves for prosumer types as well as the production and conversion system technology are based on the available energy resources. During initiation, the regulatory context, the compliance to regulatory requirements, synergies or counter-synergies with policy targets are also investigated. The initiation phase ends with the social approach, where the social impacts, the project's positive and negative implications, and potential integrations with other community-driven projects such as car-sharing, co-housing are assessed. The depth of transition delivered by ECs depend on who is involved and who leads the process during initiation. Most can be classified as government-driven or bottom-up, grassroots initiatives [101], however, there are existing ECs that were initiated by organised institutional entrepreneurs as intermediaries, like banks, public bodies, consultants [100].

The complexity of the design phase of each EC is heavily influenced by the use-case. For RECs, the community is on its own by using the right set of tools and expert help [87,96,97]. Whereas, the number of actors involved in P2PM necessitate a trading platform to handle all interactions between the different stakeholders and the network operator [98]. In case of demand response (DRC), the DSO and an aggregator need to have access to the EC's devices [99]. CGO use-cases involve local utilities, state and federal actors and research institutes [49].

In the operation phase ECs is split up into two parts: the incubated operation of ECs, meaning the operation with a supportive agency e.g., government, and the self-sufficient operating ECs. Most case studies reported of self-sufficient operation of RECs [95,100], whereas CGO and P2PM cases run almost exclusively through facilitators [49,102].

Beyond operation, there are multiple pathways for further development of ECs: they can scale technically or socially. Technical upscaling can mean the improvement of current use-cases, such as introducing distributed ledger technologies [52], or by better network performance and reliability [98]. It can also mean diversifying the use-case, involving new services, leading to EC hybrids. Similarly, social upscaling can mean both increasing memberships, or diversifying membership, such as by involving industrial or mobility sector actors [93].
