Abstract This paper presents the potential of building a local electricity market (LEM) to boost the deployment of the local energy communities, centred around active customers with distributed energy resources (DERs). To conduct a comprehensive and detailed study on different cases with reduced computational burdens, this paper adopts a simplified modelling approach where the market and network model simulations are performed in a cascaded, decoupled fashion. This allows achieving the optimal LEM output for the energy community with different DER assets that are not bounded by the network constraints. The investigation involves quantifying the benefits brought by LEM to energy communities by tapping the flexibility associated with trading inside the energy community. Moreover, it presents the influence of different types of DERs (mainly photovoltaics (PV) and energy storage (ES)) in customers' premises on the outcome of the LEM. The LEM demonstrates successfully the reduction of cost associated with the energy purchased from the energy retailer and maximises the consumption of locally generated clean electricity. Among the studied DER portfolios, the combination of PV and ES solution shows the highest economic potential but deteriorates the voltage profiles and shows high active power loss in the winter month among all the cases examined.