1990-2025 Impact report: 35 years of empowering local communities in deciding their future

In 2025, we celebrated 35 years of action. This anniversary is an opportunity to look back not only at the evolution of our network and members, but also at how we have navigated, influenced and sometimes anticipated the political context shaping Europe’s energy transition. 

Energy Cities was founded in the early 1990s, at a time when energy was not yet a European priority and climate change barely featured on political agendas. In our birth country, France, energy policy was steered entirely at the national level, with little concern for emissions reduction, and no meaningful role for local authorities. 

From the outset, Energy Cities was built on a visionary conviction: we will only succeed in building a better, low-carbon future if local authorities are empowered to decide their own energy future, democratically and in the public interest.  

From this certainty, our mission was born: to shape EU and national policies for a decentralised, democratic and decarbonised energy system. 

Over the past 35 years, climate and energy have moved from the margins to the centre of European policymaking. Accompanying these political shifts, we have played an active role in consistently rooting these policies in local contexts across Europe and beyond.  

We have done this while strengthening local capacity to steer the transition and connecting a vast network of pioneering cities and towns to form a strong community of on-the-ground changemakers leading the way. 

Here is a look back at the past three and a half decades, and how Energy Cities, our members and our partners have helped shape the world we are in today and the tomorrow we aspire to build together.