Thriving Communities Energy Incubator
Energy is an essential action-area for any community.
Community energy initiatives are a great place for communities to start building new collaboration models, experience and investment models. These then provide a platform for launching even more radical changes, on top of their direct benefits.
Unfortunately, community energy remains very underdeveloped in SE Europe. More community energy actions really need to be happening everywhere, which is why Community Energy is a key area we work on. We draw on expertise from across our collective to encourage and support communities in this area – through our community energy incubator programme.
The Thriving Communities Energy Incubator is a support model that is built around:
- Capacity Development – to help community-leaders, municipalities and citizens to understand the opportunities of community energy and to create impactful community energy projects and enterprise models.
- Coaching for start-up community energy initiatives – especially in areas such as governance, organising models, co-creation, investment and business models.
- Policy and Procurement Innovation – to help navigate existing regulations and experiment as the EU Energy Communities directives are implemented into national legislation, also encouraging public procurement innovation to support community energy projects.
- Investment support – to develop suitable blended community, public and private financing solutions to support scaling up of community energy action.
- Learning – capturing and sharing lessons learned on community energy from across SE Europe.
We are also exploring options for developing a Thriving Communities crowd-investment platform to help support communities with citizen-investment processes. We would pilot this with a focus on community energy projects.
