Renewable and Citizen Energy Communities in the European Union: A Structured Review of Legal Frameworks, Implementation Barriers and Anchor-Prosumer Pathways in Romania

Energy communities (ECs) are becoming a key institutional instrument for decentralizing the European energy transition, yet their implementation remains constrained by fragmented legal interpretation, uneven national transposition, and unresolved socio-technical coordination problems. This review synthesizes the peer-reviewed literature, EU primary legal texts, and national legislation to clarify the distinction between Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) and Citizen Energy Communities (CECs), alongside the amendment relationship between the RED II and RED III directives. The analysis demonstrates that the scalability of these initiatives depends less on theoretical legal recognition and more on aligning operational frameworks, including metering, settlement, cybersecurity, and equitable allocation rules. The Romanian case illustrates this challenge clearly: rapid prosumer growth creates valuable distributed generation but also exposes physical grid constraints, asymmetric socio-economic participation capacity, and weak experience with cooperative energy governance. To address these vulnerabilities, this paper contributes a focused analytical framework linking energy justice, peer-to-peer game-theoretic modeling, and the strategic integration of “anchor-prosumers.” The study argues that larger renewable self-consumers can act as stabilizing community anchors when internal energy prices are designed between wholesale export values and retail import prices, thereby improving both producer incentives and consumer affordability. Future research developments, including targeted surveys and longitudinal empirical validations, will sustain this claim and optimize the socio-economic resilience of decentralized energy markets.