Community energy: A practical guide to reclaiming power

If you feel overwhelmed by the climate crisis, you’re not alone. It is often hard to imagine where to even begin. Actions like petitions or demonstrations don’t feel enough to meet the scale of the crisis, and demanding action from political leaders can also feel disempowering, when you want to make changes yourself.

We need a very different energy system. We need to stop burning fossil fuels that disrupt our climate, and we need a decentralised system to switch to 100% renewables. To make that switch, we also need to dramatically reduce our energy consumption.

This is a handbook to give you the tools to get practical and take action. Taking practical steps to initiate projects and change things with others in your community is the best way to relieve climate anxiety.

You and your community won’t be on your own. Millions of people across Europe are stepping up, growing their own food, reusing and upcycling used products, creating sharing communities, resisting fossil fuel projects, and running community spaces. Community energy initiatives in particular have great potential to tackle climate change.

We need all hands on deck to transform our energy system. We need to think beyond electricity and include community projects on heat and transport, as many community projects are already doing.

Demanding action from politicians is important, but we can also take matters into our own hands. You can start building the energy system of the future in your neighbourhood, your university, or your town, right now.

Getting involved in a community energy initiative is not always easy but it can transform your community, take back power from big polluting corporations, as well as kick-start a local energy transition. You will get to know your neighbours, and experience a new feeling of being connected and rooted in your community. Being part of a group, working together to overcome challenges is rewarding and empowering.

You will learn new ways to talk about climate change and other global issues that affect your community by bringing the conversation close to home, to your school, neighborhood, or city.

This guide is a call to action. It’s a call to get active locally, and become part of a growing movement of people who are reclaiming power. It will connect you and your community to a history of decades of local action on energy, since the very first communities set up their own renewable projects in Denmark in the 1970s.

You can join or start a group that will play a vital role in the huge project that is the energy transition. There will be bumps and barriers on the road to success, but you won’t be alone.

You can do it! Join the energy revolution.

10 Reasons to start or join a Community Energy Project

1. You’ll be building the system needed to stop the climate crisis
2. Community renewables redirect money supporting the fossil fuel system
3. It can reduce energy poverty in your area
4. You’ll get to know your neighbours and strengthen your community
5. You will produce your own renewable energy
6. It creates spaces to educate people on the issues of energy, climate and democracy
7. It keeps the money locally in your community
8. You will contribute to creating a more local, more circular economy
9. You will be building the kind of world you want to see
10. You will show other communities what is possible