Energy Communities Coalition – DESMI: the energy democracy movement in Greece is maturing
The Energy Communities Coalition – DESMI: the energy democracy movement in Greece is maturing
The energy democracy movement continues to grow and mature. Against the background of an ongoing energy crisis, energy communities can provide cheap, clean, locally produced energy to their members. Thus, they are a tool for the fight against energy poverty, collective environmental action, but also the empowerment of citizens.
The Coalition of Energy Communities (DESMI) is a pan-Hellenic body representing open-type and broad-based energy communities. It was officially founded in 2024, but it has already been active for years, with its members organizing collective actions of political advocacy and skill building. Today it has 20 founding members and is surrounded by 7 supporting bodies, such as academic institutions, environmental organizations and civil society bodies, while many more communities have expressed interest in joining.
On Monday, October 21, 2024, Desmi organized the first pan-Hellenic conference of energy communities in Serafio. The conference was an opportunity for networking between the energy communities themselves, political decision-makers, social economy actors, but also the wider market. During the one-day event, the most pressing issues concerning the energy communities in Greece today were discussed, such as their participation in new innovative activities such as e.g. storage, energy flexibility, and savings.
Two dynamic dialogues around the issues of the Just Transition and the energy communities’ access to the electricity sector, highlighted multiple challenges, but also opportunities. Emphasis was placed on the difficulty of small energy communities to connect to the grid, due to saturation, and especially in areas of just transition, such as in Western Macedonia, where central energy planning has given absolute priority to large projects by private investors. The need to promote storage projects, with support from public resources (such as the NSRF) was discussed so that energy communities can move forward with the development of new projects. Finally, special emphasis was placed on the role of Municipalities in promoting a local fair energy transition. Municipalities can collaborate with citizen energy communities, co-designing renewable energy projects (eg, photovoltaics) to meet the needs of households and small and medium-sized businesses locally.
The role of energy communities to empower and inform households about the digital transition of the energy sector was also emphasized throughout the conference. In particular, as the penetration of RES in the energy mix increases, citizens will have to adjust their daily consumption profile – for example, put in a washing machine or charge their electric car at noon, whenever the production from photovoltaics is at its maximum and low energy prices. The so-called ” energy flexibility ” is one of the most important pillars of the future system, and it already has practical results in the daily lives of citizens, as can be seen from the abolition of the night tariff , and its replacement by the noon tariff.
The event closed with a participatory workshop by the Heinrich Bell Foundation on recording the social impact of energy communities . The purpose of the workshop was to highlight practical social actions, such as the provision of free electricity or biomass pellets for heating by energy communities to vulnerable households. The highlighting of the social dimension of energy communities is also their notable difference from private RES projects, which focus exclusively on profit. This was also one of the main conclusions of the Conference: the need for coordinated advocacy actions so that the model of energy communities, and thus the right of citizens to collectively produce their own energy, is protected and expanded, despite the reactions from organizations ras.