29 July 2024 – With recent EU directives imposing greater obligations on Member States to tackle energy poverty while leveraging the opportunities presented by energy communities, as part of the Community Energy for Energy Solidarity (CEES) project, we participated in developing a handbook to help energy communities develop a business model and projects that address social issues in their local community.
Energy Solidarity Handbook: Practical ways to address energy poverty for energy communities is based on the experiences of ZEZ and other CEES project partners during the implementation of support activities for households in energy vulnerable situations in the period from 2021 to 2024.
The activity that we carried out at the Green Energy Cooperative, which has served as the basis of our insights in this Handbook, is the successful campaign Let’s Ease Their Concerns. In the fall of 2022, we collected donations for energy-saving packages, which we then provided for free, along with educational consultations, to 250 households at risk of energy poverty in the City of Zagreb and Zagreb County.
Experiences of ZEZ and other CEES partners have shown room for improvement in these areas:
- Offering energy solidarity services disrupts the typical business models of energy communities: while the delivery of social benefits, including cheap, clean energy, is at the core of the mission of most energy communities, the human resources needed to undertake energy solidarity actions are difficult to absorb within existing business models.
- Working with vulnerable households requires different skill sets: energy communities typically employ people who have expertise in technical and political issues. Identifying and involving individuals facing energy poverty requires advanced ‘soft’ skills that are more closely related to the fields within the social sciences.
- Service delivery is more complex than expected: strengthening people’s understanding of energy and how to use it more wisely is a valuable mechanism that helps them reduce energy bills or feel more comfortable in their homes. Implementing tailored interventions (even minor ones) is far more effective. However, all CEES partners found considerable hesitation regarding the possibility of home visits by representatives of energy communities.
- Financing energy solidarity measures remains a considerable challenge: CEES partners who previously provided such services relied heavily on grants to do so. Attempts at alternative funding methods during the project yielded varying degrees of success.
The Handbook assesses each type of energy solidarity mechanism we have undertaken in relation to: a) material costs; b) required human resources; and c) ease of replication. Although each mechanism comes with its own challenges, our experiences have shown that solutions exist, and the first step towards them is inclusivity and altruism in considering solutions. This Handbook offers many valuable next steps and, as such, we believe it will assist numerous energy communities in determining what is feasible regarding their resources.
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