EUSEW Session: Empowering energy communities: building capacity for social innovation

As we celebrate the five-year anniversary of the Clean Energy Package (incl. REDII and IEMD), this EUSEW provides an opportunity to discuss the importance of social innovation for Europe’s energy transition, and – with this in mind – explore remaining barriers and possible solutions to the deployment of energy community projects.

Social innovation in energy communities comes in many forms; energy communities can empower formerly passive citizens, including energy poor and vulnerable households. By balancing local production and consumption, they can further help reduce energy bills. Yet, citizens involved in an energy community often lack the necessary skills to navigate the energy ecosystem, and barriers remain in administrative procedures and grid connection for example.

Focusing on the social innovation aspects of energy communities, this session will touch on the next steps envisioned through Fit for 55, the ways in which energy communities help respond to the energy crisis, and inform the National Energy and Climate Plans updates, which will provide a useful monitoring tool in this context for EU Member States.

To this end, this session will explore non-regulatory issues and barriers related to social innovation, project design, development and implementation, as well as the design of suitable policy measures to help overcome these barriers. Contents of the session will be based on experiences from energy communities engaging in different social innovation activities, as well as the policy analysis and guidance materials elaborated by the Energy Communities Repository and the Rural Energy Community Advisory Hub.

To this end, this session will explore non-regulatory issues and barriers related to social innovation, project design, development and implementation, as well as the design of suitable policy measures to help overcome these barriers. Contents of the session will be based on experiences from energy communities engaging in different social innovation activities, as well as the policy analysis and guidance materials elaborated by the Energy Communities Repository and the Rural Energy Community Advisory Hub.

The session targets policymakers at EU, national and local level, as well as energy community practitioners.

The format will be a panel discussion between a combination of EU, regional and local actors, interspersed with Sli.Do polls to engage the audience. Instead of presentations, each panelist will be asked to select one image representing their main discussion point. The images will be integrated as backgrounds into the panel discussion. Policy-makers will be prompted to react to the challenges and opportunities outlined by the energy community panelists in an active discussion.