Deployment of Energy Communities in Colombia
Juan Manuel España Forero, A.M Ramírez-Tovar, Laura Duque Restrepo
EnergEIA, EIA university
With the project “Guidelines to promote the deployment and financing of community solar solutions in Colombia”, we will assess the potential growth of energy communities in the country, generate a financial model for their implementation, and run workshops with different stakeholders and communities to get relevant inputs and share our results. We seek to collect national and international experiences on the design and implementation of solar communities to identify the regulatory enabling conditions, financing options, and their social, economic, technical, and environmental benefits. Finally, we aim to make all the collected information and results available for the different stakeholders to raise their awareness of the benefits of solar communities.
Background
The EIA University’s research group on energy, EnergEIA, focuses on supporting the energy transition in Colombia from the perspective of end users, distributed energy resources, and digital technologies. With this purpose, they founded the Transactive Energy Initiative Colombia, a project through which they have run two pilots in Medellín, one under a peer-to-peer scheme and another on energy communities. This new project collects the learnings from these pilots.
Energy communities
Energy communities are defined as organizations created, managed, and owned by civil society. They allow people to take an active role in the energy market (Bauwens, Gotchev, & Holstenkamp, 2016; Verna & Sebi, 2020) and to satisfy their energy needs by adopting cooperative approaches (Ceglia, Esposito, Marrasso, & Sasso, 2020). From a technical perspective, energy communities will renew the traditional electric chain by introducing prosumers (Figure 1), consumers with the capacity to generate energy on a small scale to satisfy their consumption or a fraction of it.
The most tangible benefits of energy communities are the promotion of decentralized electrical systems and energy democratization, due to the inclusion of citizens in the energy market, previously restricted to big organizations such as utilities and large-scale generators. Previous research has shown that the energy transition will only be successful if citizens are highly involved and engaged. Under this scenario, energy communities become a powerful tool to educate and engage citizens on energy-transition-related topics.
“Citizen participation in the energy transition embodies the difference between something being imposed upon a community and something being chosen by the community to pursue themselves Ensuring that citizens are at the centre of the energy transition and are active participants and leaders of the transition is not only practically important but has ethical merits” (Haf & Robison, 2020).
In terms of CO2 emissions reduction, energy communities also contribute to decarbonization strategies. By promoting decentralization, the primary energy sources will start being renewable, mainly solar, since it is the most feasible one. For this reason, we will focus on the deployment of solar energy community solutions in Colombia through the three research stages presented in Figure 2.
Key Factors
In the first stage, we will identify the optimal conditions for implementing Solar Communities by mapping recent Energy Community approaches in Colombia, such as El Salvador Solar Community in Medellin-Antioquia and Robles Community in Jamundí-Valle del Cauca. Through this stage, we will understand the environmental, technical, and socioeconomic requirements for Solar Communities installation and maintenance in the Colombian context. As part of this exploring-understanding, we will define a framework to describe the viability scenarios, potential benefits, and potential growth, and asses if the current policy framework enables the establishment of Energy Communities as a new business model to transform the power industry over the next decade.
Step by Step
In the second stage, we will develop a roadmap to access funding for solar communities. Whereas every requirement will be relevant, financing commonly represents the major challenge since communities’ active participation in the electricity sector demands a financial investment that is not often accessible. In this matter, we will build a roadmap to guide people through the process of conforming to Energy Communities and accessing financing by clarifying the communication channel between the final user and the financing entity.
Institutional capacities
Consequently, in the third stage, we will create tools to build capacities among different authorities, territorial entities, and private sector actors to implement Solar Communities in their territories. It is softy clear that citizen engagement in the energy transition is imperative, and Solar Communities are a path to achieve it. Therefore, we will propose promotion strategies alongside the Colombian energy Ministry (Ministerio de Minas y Energía) and other government agencies, city halls, and town halls. The core of this project is to conceive Solar Communities, further than from an academic perspective, from a perspective built out of the interaction between different stakeholders, allowing citizens to play an active part in energy decarbonization, decentralization, and democratization.
The project started on July 1st of 2022, and it is expected to end on May 30th of 2023.
If you have experience on Energy Communities and would lik to collaborate, contact us!
Ana María Ramírez Tovar, ana.ramirez68@eia.edu.co
Laura Duque Restrepo, laura.duque41@eia.edu.co
References
Bauwens, T., Gotchev, B., & Holstenkamp, L. (2016). What drives the development of community energy in Europe? The case of wind power cooperatives. Energy Research & Social Science, 13, 136–147. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2015.12.016
Ceglia, F., Esposito, P., Marrasso , E., & Sasso, M. (2020). From smart energy community to smart energy municipalities: Literature review, agendas and pathways. Journal of Cleaner Production, 254. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2020.120118
Haf, S., & Robison, R. (April de 2020). How Local Authorities can encourage citizen participation in energy transitions. Recuperado el July} de 2022, de Energy Cities: https://energy-cities.eu/publication/how-local-authorities-can-encourage-citizen-participation-in-energy-transitions/#:~:text=Citizen%20participation%20in%20the%20energy,the%20transition%20is%20not%20only
Verna, A.-L., & Sebi, C. (2020). Energy communities and their ecosystems: A comparison of France and the Netherlands. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 158. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2020.120123
