Community power: enabling legislation to increase community ownership for RES projects across Europe

Duration: 2013 - 2016 ● Client: European Commission (IEE) ● WIP Role: Market uptake, Policy development ● www.communitypower.eu

CO-POWER supports the development of community owned projects on Renewable Energy (RES) and Energy Efficiency across Europe. It addresses legislative issues and facilitates financing of community RES projects by EU funds. The project builds a broad coalition of key actors by using information and promotion of community RES projects at the EU level. This enables national and EU level policy makers to remove market barriers and to encourage the development of community RES projects and accompanying infrastructure.

The project increases the understanding of the benefits of community power among citizens and gives them an opportunity to get involved in their own energy production. This will improve RES uptake in the electricity market in Europe.

The CO-POWER project has three specific implementation objectives:

• To identify legal barriers and solutions for community RES projects resulting in recommendations for EU and national level legislation.
• To facilitate financing of community RES projects in 6 Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) countries (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Poland, and Slovakia) by making significant amounts of public-private finance available to community RES projects, leveraged by EU funds.
• To build a broad coalition involving key actors, using information and promotion of community RES projects in at least 6 countries and at the EU level to obtain broader support from citizens groups and local, regional, national governments and EU policy makers.

Within the CO-POWER project, the following 6 European target countries are supported: Denmark, Czech Republic, Spain, Hungary, Ireland and UK. In addition, the project reaches out other countries. Partners from these countries will speed-up the development of community RES projects by creating a favourable legislation. In addition, financing of community RES projects in 6 CEE countries will be supported.