Community-building with coffee beans and roof tops
The community energy accreditation scheme brings everything together
Community energyAbout
Everyone has the right and duty to participate in the energy transition. However, not everyone knows well how to go about that. An energy system with strong participation from everyone is still something new to citizens as much as it is to SMEs or local administrations. Guess what? We have a set of tools that can help local governments understanding the community energy concept and allocating their resources towards the right actions! Espresso is one of them.
When we launched the community energy accreditation scheme a few months ago, we knew municipalities were keen to learn more about ways of supporting and creating renewable projects with the people and organisations in their area. Since then, 13 municipalities across Europe have signed the charter, the official step to kick off participation in the scheme. Backed by the city leaders, municipal employees started their learning journey by following the Espresso training with its six modules. From communication over financing to public procurement, the self-paced online course covers it all. “The Espresso training is about the basics of community energy and still, I learned a lot and it helped me change my perspective and gave me new ideas for community projects in our municipality.” Todor Popov told us last week in a video call. He is member of the team of the Energy Efficiency Centre and Director of the Directorate for Administrative and Legal Services of the Municipality of Gabrovo (Bulgaria), one of the soon-to-be accredited local authorities. Gabrovo is about to set up an energy community around some of his public buildings, involving crowdfunding and sharing surplus energy.
The training helped me change my perspective and gave me new ideas for community projects in our municipality.
We do hope that the training as much as the other components of the accreditation scheme can have a similar transformative impact in many municipalities: The accreditation scheme is a way for cities and municipalities
- to first self-assess where they stand by taking the self-assessment test,
- grow their internal capacities through the Espresso training (still running until September!) and lastly,
- to display on the Asset match-making tool the roofs, brownfields or other unused public spaces that could serve community-driven installations of renewable energy.
The certificate which is delivered at the very end is not only a precious recognition of a city’s efforts to make the energy transition happen and a marketing tool to promote this engagement. It is also and above all a means to make new local partnerships happen and to connect mutual interests around energy that benefits everyone. Lastly, each certified municipality will be stronger at the end of the journey with a more solid community, a local energy supply, lower energy expenses, higher public acceptance and shared revenues for all.
