Renewable, Sustainable/Social, Communities (RSC)

Delegating the validation of each individual user's contribution to large centralized intermediaries only weakens everyone's privacy, shifting responsibility away from local communities and those who truly drive the transition on the ground: the Prosumers.

A global platform, a network provider, or a data intermediary is often asked to enforce rigid control policies in the name of system security. However, no centralized actor can replace the value and judgment of an Energy Community or a local ecosystem. As aptly expressed in the article by Jaromil, regarding the effect of a regulation that claims to provide us with greater security, this centralization hides a high price that falls upon the collective:

• More granular consumption profiling
• More metadata handed over to third parties
• More barriers to entry for those who lack the latest smart meter, perfect bureaucratic requirements, or advanced digital skills.

Once this surveillance layer exists, it rarely stays confined to grid balancing.

This is not a simple technical optimization; it is a new layer of control over our most vital resource. Once this surveillance layer exists, it rarely stays confined to grid balancing. An infrastructure built to monitor a single kWh is easily reused to track habits, lifestyles, or to impose new forms of gatekeeping.

Belonging to an Energy Community means reversing this course: allowing prosumers to share and valorize their contribution internally, without having to disclose it externally, thereby protecting their privacy and ensuring true decentralized security. This is how we move from universal control to conscious participation.

In this scenario, security is not a technical optional, but the very prerequisite of the prosumer's freedom. Within the Energy Community, data encryption acts as a protective veil: it allows the validation of an individual's energy contribution—ensuring that every kWh produced and shared is real and traceable—without having to expose identity or consumption habits outside the community perimeter.

The real danger lies in the scalable nature of centralized digital identity. Once an external service gains access to a user's consumption profile, a dangerous precedent is set. What begins as simple monitoring of electrical load can easily scale, through metadata analysis, toward much more sensitive information: when we are at home, which appliances we use, and even our health status or socio-economic routines.

Relying on an external control infrastructure means accepting that a third party can, at any time, 'raise the stakes' and demand increasingly deeper disclosures. The Energy Community, instead, must function as a security buffer: a place where data is aggregated, protected by cryptographic protocols, and anonymized before any interaction with the external market.

Protecting the individual's data within the community serves not only to guarantee privacy but to prevent access to an energy service from becoming a Trojan horse for indiscriminate digital surveillance. It is the difference between being users monitored by a system and active citizens governing their own resource.

We believe that it is time to go beyond Technological Solutionism and help Communities shape their own environment and knowledge by providing a Toolkit with which they can build their own house and decide who is invited to enter it.

Our call to action started within the PROSUME project and we believe it is time to extend its mission further.