Guidelines on community-led heating and cooling

The 7 Cooperative Principles

While the legal form of your energy community does not matter, many energy communities decide to establish a “cooperative” to carry out their activities. Independently of the legal form, when creating your energy community and its H&C project, it is highly advisable to build it around the 7 cooperative principles:

• Voluntary and Open Membership: Energy communities and cooperatives are voluntary organisations, open to all persons able to use their services and willing to accept the responsibilities of membership, without gender, social, racial, political or religious descrimination.
• Democratic Member Control: Energy communities and cooperatives are democratic organisations controlled by their members, who actively participate in setting policies and making decisions. The elected representatives are accountable to the membership. In primary cooperatives and energy communities, members have equal voting rights through the one-member-one-vote principle.
• Member’s Economic Participation: Members contribute equitably to, and democratically control, the capital of their cooperative or energy community. At least part of that capital is usually the common property of the cooperative. Members usually receive limited compensation, if any, on capital subscribed as a condition of membership. Members allocate surpluses for any or all of the following 3 purposes: developing the cooperative, possibly by setting up reserves, part of which at least would be indivisible; benefitting members in proportion to their transactions with the cooperative; and supporting other activities approved by the membership (such as citizen-led renovations, shared mobility, or power production projects).
• Autonomy and Independence: Energy communities and cooperatives are autonomous, self-help organisations controlled by their members. If they enter into agreements with other organisations, including governments, or raise capital from external sources, they do so on terms that ensure democratic control by their members and maintain their cooperative autonomy.
• Education, Training, and Information: Cooperatives and energy communities provide education and training for their members, elected representatives, managers, and employees so that they can effectively contribute to the development of the energy community or cooperative.
• Cooperation Among Cooperatives: Energy communities and cooperatives serve their members most effectively and strengthen the cooperative movement by working together through local, regional, national, and supranational structures.
• Concern for Community: While focusing on member needs, energy communities and cooperatives work for the sustainable development of their communities through policies accepted by their members.