The primary bottleneck for European community-scale green energy isn't a lack of funding or tech, but the legal absence of a specific 'aggregator' license.
April 1, 2026
Original Paper
Charging Without Subsidy: How the CPO-Aggregator Framework Unlocks Community-Scale Distributed Energy Investment in Europe
SSRN · 6468098
The Takeaway
Despite having the money, demand, and technology ready, investors are unable to fund community EV charging and storage hubs because EU laws lack a specific licensing pathway for operators to pool energy. This reveals that the green transition is being stalled by a simple 'missing link' in legal architecture rather than financial or technical hurdles.
From the abstract
<p>Europe's distributed energy transition faces a commercial architecture problem. Community-scale EV charging infrastructure integrating battery energy storage, solar generation, and balancing market participation under a multi-investor financing structure without subsidy dependency has not been deployed at commercial scale in any EU market, despite regulatory frameworks, commercial technology, and growing EV fleets being in place. This paper identifies the structural cause, designs the solutio