The COALESCCE project (Community Owned and Led Energy for Security Climate Change and the Economy) was designed to increase the capacity for community based approaches to local renewable energy provision across Europe in order to reduce carbon emissions, increase energy security and tackle fuel poverty whilst driving ‘Green Growth’.
We adopted a community energy definition as the provision of energy infrastructure, primarily renewable energy generating infrastructure but also energy efficiency measures, led by community groups and owned wholly or partly by local communities typically through the issue of community shares, using local supply chains and providing local employment opportunities, motivated by the objectives of environmental improvement and keeping the value of energy generation within the local population rather than it going to large national and multinational corporations.
At the time state interventions were skewed towards support of large corporations which offered poor value to local communities, keeping benefits at a corporate level. The project wanted to increase investment and involvement in local community energy investment via support from Structural Fund and ETC programmes.
The project started in January 2017 and partners have met to peer review the state of the community energy sectors in all partner regions, this saw the development of Regional action plans based on the results of the reviews, this was followed by a 2 year implementation period that brings us to the final conference now.
Each partner with stakeholder contributions will review their involvement in the project and give a brief description of the implementation of their own action plans, outlining any impacts in their regional community energy sector and what the project has helped deliver.