Abstract
Europe and, more particularly, the European Union (EU) has been pursuing ambitious goals in terms of energy, with pioneering energy policy pushing for more clean and affordable energy and highly competitive electricity markets. Electricity market design proved to be a challenge since the first models intended for further competition in the sector have been launched. With the increasing use of distributed and renewable-based electricity generation, electricity models became increasingly challenging. Other distributed energy resources, namely demand flexibility, distributed storage, and electric vehicles, are also bringing new requirements for electricity markets and open the way for local electricity markets. Although still an emerging concept, local electricity markets have huge potential, namely regarding increased gathering of the demand flexibility potential and to bring significant benefits to consumers. This chapter addresses the EU vision for electricity markets in the new context and discusses its benefits, risks, and future perspectives, highlighting the most important legislation, and some practical advances and implementations. © 2021 Elsevier Inc.

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Local Electricity Markets introduces the fundamental characteristics, needs, and constraints shaping the design and implementation of local electricity markets. It addresses current proposed local market models and lessons from their limited practical implementation. The work discusses relevant decision and informatics tools considered important in the implementation of local electricity markets. It also includes a review on management and trading platforms, including commercially available tools. Aspects of local electricity market infrastructure are identified and discussed, including physical and software infrastructure. It discusses the current regulatory frameworks available for local electricity market development internationally. The work concludes with a discussion of barriers and opportunities for local electricity markets in the future. © 2021 Elsevier Inc.

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Smart grid (SG) technologies are playing a key role in the electric grid transformation, bringing out promising benefits for different actors and empowering customers. However, this transition imposes new challenges concerning the operation and management of energy, particularly at the distribution level of the electric grid. This chapter provides an overview of achieved advances toward the widespread implementation of SG, including technological and infrastructure developments. Transactive energy presents a distributed decision-making coordination approach using automated energy transactions that is enabled by the intelligence and connectivity benefits of SG. The way in which these transactions can be integrated in a local market environment and how advances in transactive energy, supported by the infrastructure already developed to enable SG, are leading to the emergence of local energy markets is discussed in this chapter. © 2021 Elsevier Inc.

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