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Engaging with Stakeholders to develop collective energy actions and overcome regulative barriers

Engaging with Stakeholders to develop collective energy actions and overcome regulative barriers

28 Jan 22

DECIDE starts 2022 with an interactive Workshop on the topic stakeholder engagement to facilitate the uptake of energy communities and collective action, which took place Web 26 January.

Starting from the assumption that the difficulties that new community-cantered energy projects might ease their life if  the relevant stakeholders are engaged in an open dialogue, Jill Adams and Matteo Vanzini from the Prospect Institute, took participants trough a 1.5 h exploration of different possible approaches.

To set the scene Lucija Rakocevic, coordinating the DECIDE project, stressed the great importance of knowledge sharing to really step up the uptake of energy communities and collective actions. After almost 1 year and a half of activities and over 18 initiatives between Pilots and DECIDERs, the project start to focus on replicability and   to understand the social, regulatory and business framework that can favour the uptake of energy communities to find  “the right receipt, which might (probably) be different in different parts of Europe” for a wider roll-out of energy collective actions.

Some concrete inputs were given by the DECIDE pilots HERON, Tartu Regional Energy Agency (TREA), DomX and the DECIDERs Km0 that briefly introduced, together with their respective scope of action, the variety of the stakeholders engaged overtime to match expand energy community projects.

Active in Greece, HERON was presented by Athanasios as the “extroverted” energy supply company which is looking to sustainability way beyond profits.  In the last years, they have been pursuing their goal of increasing RES share by investing in innovation and partnership with start-ups, academia and individuals. A tangible result of the success of such an approach is the positive relation build with the HYPERION energy community. 

Santi from Spain, focused on the difficulties that normal people might in understanding concepts related to energy taking the reading of the energy bill as an example. On the other side, with his organization Km0 which is supporting over 90 energy community project to take off and roll out, he saw the eager of private citizens as well as municipalities to take up an active role on the energy market.

From the Eastern Europe, Marteen shared the experience of the TREA which have at the centre of its activities energy management and renovation of the soviet era building stock, combined with RES installation. Aiming at refurbishing multi-apartment hosing, apartment associations are their main target group to which they have to prove that renovation can be affordable and good results can be achieved by right design. Thanks to their position, municipalities and ministries are also often seeking inputs from them.

The smart solutions that DomX have been developing, allows individuals to have a clear understanding of the impact of their heating habits in terms of consumption and costs and take action consequently. Stratos explained the great potential of this technology for communities and to link this solution with individuals, especially when living in condominium, as well as municipalities is their objective for the months to come.

Following the presentations, everyone was divided in four rooms, each one with one of the speaker present. There, the discussion were enriched by the contribution of participants that could ask questions and bring their own experience to the table. 

Among the many outputs of the conversations it was highlighted the need to really work on communication to make sure that this community-cantered transition toward a more sustainable energy system is really understood by their protagonists. This is particular relevant when approaching social housing. A good practice is to really go on site and visit together the places where interventions are supposed to take place, to help imagining the interventions.

Also, to identify some “entry point” person that can then pass over the message in a more effective way within a specific target group can also be very effective.

Municipalities has been mentioned as an entity to engage because of the trust that people have on it, especially in the small villages; while in the big cities the low “community” feeling makes engagement more complex.

It is good to engage stakeholders in the broad sense, as some might be surprisingly flexible in accepting new proposals.

 

Watch the recording of the workshop here.

Read and download the presentations from:

Athanasios Papakonstantinou, Heron, Greece

Marten Saareoks, TREA - Tartu Regional Energy Agency, Estonia

Santi Martínez, Km0, Spain

Stratos Keranidis, DomX, Greece



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