Islanders against all odds: Community energy strategies in a small paradise in Croatia

Imagine clear waters, unspoiled nature, coastal towns and lots of sun! This is where we take you to today: to the island of Cres in Croatia with its biggest town, the municipality of Cres. In 2020, the island adopted its energy transition vision with the idea of setting up an energy community. Two members of this energy transition team are with me today:  Franjo Toić, who is a public official at Cres municipality and Ugo Toic, who is the Director of the public Island Development Agency OTRA.

From the local monastery to the fire brigades, Ugo and Franjo involve everyone when energy decisions are meant to be taken on Cres. One of their biggest projects is the first community-owned ground-mounted PV installation on the island. But as the Croatian law still makes it very difficult to register and run an energy community, they do so through an energy cooperative that has this special feature of including two municipalities as members. This is quite unique in Croatia and uncommon in the EU.

Ugo and Franjo are, respectively, President and Manager of this energy cooperative called Apsyrtides. In this episode they tell us how community work is driving their island’s energy transition, but also how Croatian law is still not ready for it. They are about to design a voucher model in cooperation with the water management company to allow residents to co-finance smaller solar projects. We also talked about the need for long-term secure electricity contracts with PPAs being still a promising but hard-to-realise option in Croatia.

Similar exciting people-powered initiatives will be in the spotlight of the upcoming final event of the SCCALE 20-30-50 project. It’s on October 7th 11:30-17:30 in Brussels. Register now and join us there!

This episode was produced with support from SCCALE 20-30-50. SCCALE is an EU project (Horizon 2020 programme) which makes collaboration happen to get many more energy communities up and running. The people behind SCCALE203050 work on a methodology and toolkit for citizens, cities and policy makers. If you, too, want to see more local energy communities across Europe, check out the toolkit and explore all of the project’s resources at the website sccale203050.eu.