Cultivating the burgeoning diversity of community energy initiatives
Increasingly decentralised energy resources and a growing contribution of renewable energy sources is highlighting the essential role of citizen engagement in achieving the EU’s ambitious goals. The EU-funded DECIDE project set out to develop a ‘recipe for success’ when establishing collective energy actions.
Collective energy actions: not one size fits all
DECIDE discovered that there are many existing approaches to energy management involving citizens. The project looked into more than 40 such initiatives in 12 Member States and found that most could not be classified as energy communities according to the definitions in EU legislation. According to project coordinator Lucija Rakocevic of TH!NK E: “There was a high degree of diversity across Europe and even within the same region or town. Motivations of the actions were similar but their organisation and priority activities varied significantly.”
The right stuff: mixing and matching elements according to need
With no silver bullet in sight, DECIDE created ‘building blocks’ that can be combined in different ways to help citizen energy actions grow. Among them are two games that proved to be excellent at engaging a broader and more diverse group of stakeholders: one to raise awareness and one to help form an action plan. The board game called ‘The power of community’ was designed to give users a sense of what collective energy actions and the energy transition are. People from 5 to 80 years old enjoyed playing it. The online game ‘Your energy vision’ helped interested stakeholders map out their priorities for a collective energy action. “In addition to the citizen energy games, the project created descriptions of 7 business models and 13 energy services, along with a checklist for legally setting up an initiative. Our project website hosts the knowledge hub with reports, webinars, podcasts and more,” notes Rakocevic. Finally, the ‘Energy Communities Hub’ aimed at mapping citizen energy community (CEC) or renewable energy community (REC) initiatives in different Member States with a focus on the regulatory environment.
Throwing a wider net, quantifying benefits
DECIDE’s research led to two key recommendations. “To better understand the citizen energy landscape, we should expand the focus to collective energy actions and not only RECs and CECs. In addition, we need quantifiable and widely used key performance indicators (KPIs) so the research community can compare results to better understand their actual benefits,” notes Rakocevic. DECIDE developed a list of KPIs to support collaboration, among them social KPIs that capture the benefits energy communities have on decreasing energy poverty. Similarly, “together with the BECoop project, we formed a group of sister projects related to energy communities and other collective energy actions. More than 15 Horizon 2020 projects now meet once a month to discuss ongoing activities and how we can create synergies.” DECIDE has shown that citizen engagement in the energy transition goes beyond RECs and CECs. It has also laid the foundations for identifying, supporting and learning from these diverse energy actions involving citizens that will contribute to achieving Europe’s ambitious goals.
Keywords
DECIDE, energy, collective energy actions, energy communities, CECs, RECs, renewable energy, citizen energy communities, energy poverty, renewable energy communities
