Guidelines on community-led heating and cooling

Governance of your energy community

Energy communities are different all over Europe because they function in different legal contexts, and exist to fulfill different needs for their members. However they all share certain common characteristics. The main one being the energy community’s desire to share decision-making between their stakeholders (citizens + municipalities, and/or SMEs) on a foundation of transparency, democratisation, and not-for-profit.

The decision-making body of energy communities (the general assembly) are cooperative in nature, where collegiality and the one-person-one-vote principle are key cornerstones. Usually, the energy community is split into two more sections: a political, and an operational one. While the “political” section includes the board of directors, and sometimes also ethics committees, the “operational” section includes the practical administration of the energy community’s heating and cooling activities.

In an energy community, cooperation is bottom-up, rather than top-down. It cannot be decreed, but is rather built step by step; Oftentimes the initiative starts from a “founder” (or founders) who try to bring together several citizens, municipalities, and SMEs into the notion of shared governance. There exist certain risks after the first few years, such as cooperative decline, where economic issues take an increasing dominance over political ones (known as vertical fracture), or an increasing dominance of managers over the members and operational base (known as horizontal fracture). You must be careful to avoid these, as well as corporate capture where citizens lose decision-making power to other stakeholders of the energy community.