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Increasingly, energy communities engage in smart grid experiments to explore new ways to collectively generate, consume, store, manage, and trade energy. Transition literature puts forward that replication of such experiments is essential for socio-technical transformation. However, in practice many experiments remain rather isolated events that fail to contribute to sustainability transitions. Moreover, while the literature points to the importance of replication, there is little attention to how replication occurs in practice and on the perspectives of actors involved. This paper reports on action research done to explore together with Dutch and Flemish energy communities what replication of community-based Virtual Power Plant (cVPP) experiments means in practice and how this can be achieved. In line with literature, the energy communities considered replication of cVPP as an iterative and multi-dimensional process …