Adherence to institutions conducive to investment in renewable sources of energy, such as institutionalized energy communities, is an important issue as the RED III directive is being implemented in the EU. In this article, the topic is empirically investigated in the case of Poland, where massive investment in small RES installations can be observed, as well as clear spatial agglomeration of those installations, whilst the owners of those installations clearly refrain from adhering to one prominent institution, i.e. energy clusters. A model is proposed to explain that phenomenon of institutional repulsion, where transaction costs interplay with expected operational surpluses, in the presence of recoverable equity, and an opportunity cost. Empirical material investigated with the model is that on small RES installations in Poland, and their two respective markets: auctions and virtual prosumption. The model serves to explore the hypothesis that rapid deployment of renewable energy sources (RES) creates a temporarily low tolerance for transaction costs on the part of investors, seems to be strongly substantiated by the here-presented research. Still, investors in small RES installations seem to see all the period up to 2037 to as that of rapid investment in an essentially non-Markovitz portfolio, where expectations are shaped within the portfolio of investment in small RES rather than referring it to an exogenous opportunity cost.