Rethinking Energy Communities for a Just Transition. A critical view on la Estrecha Solar Community in Medellín, Colombia. Universidad EIA, Envigado, Colombia

In energy communities, individuals come together, organise, and cooperate to implement activities in the energy sector, including generation, storage, demand-management, and distribution. Energy communities typically involve collective ownership and sharing of decentralised energy resources. In other words, citizens work together to manage and benefit from renewable energy resources rather than relying solely on traditional utility companies. As models that place end-users at the centre of the transition, energy communities are gaining relevance as an innovative way of involving disadvantaged communities in a just energy transition. In those cases, the initiation, installation, financing, and operation will require significant intervention from external entities. These are top-down energy communities, in contrast to bottom-up or grassroots energy communities where the energy solution’s ideation, financing, and deployment originate within the community. This report aims to nourish the current discussion about the role of energy communities in a just energy transition and raise awareness of the potential risk of community washing, meaning using the “community” label to make an energy project more attractive or socially acceptable, but where people do not participate meaningfully. The report explores the implications of top-down energy communities based on a real case study: La Estrecha Solar Community, where a university and energy companies cooperated with local citizens to create Colombia's first energy community in a lower-middle-class neighbourhood in Medellín, Colombia. La Estrecha Solar Community achieved to bring economic benefits to the local community, opened a space for participation and learning about the energy sector, and became the first on-grid energy community project in Colombia. However, significant barriers to these models were identified, such as the high investment costs, the complexity of the connection procedures and the lack of appropriate regulatory frameworks. The conclusion is that the La Estrecha community and most communities in Colombia cannot implement a solar community independently as bottom-up initiatives. By discerning the features of bottom-up and top-down communities and reviewing the La Estrecha Solar Community case study, this report proposes two main challenges for policymakers: lowering the complexity of the legal and technical procedures and pass regulation to improve financial conditions to enable more citizens to create bottom-up energy communities and setting clear guidelines for top-down communities to prevent community washing. The report is organised as follows: Section I defines how energy communities originated as grassroots, bottom-up models. Section II explains how energy communities are considered relevant tools to solve energy poverty and vehicles for including traditionally marginalised groups in a just energy transition. Section III explains a framework to distinguish bottom-up and top-down energy communities. Section IV provides a detailed description of the La Estrecha Solar Community. Section V discusses emerging risks and provides recommendations to avoid them.