Power to the People: Community Energy Cooperatives as a Democratic Engine of Grid Decarbonisation

What Makes This Solution Impactful

The energy transition is usually discussed in gigatons and trillions, as a question of scale, capital, and political will. That framing is incomplete rather than wrong, and the gap produces a specific failure: technically sound solutions that communities experience as imposed rather than owned.

Consider instead a beach in The Hague. In 2016, the municipality began building a one-megawatt smart microgrid at Scheveningen: a cooperative between the city government and local beach entrepreneurs, running on solar panels, second-life electric vehicle batteries, and open-source energy management software. In 2025, it was named one of the top three government innovations in the Netherlands. The jury described it as “a smart regional solution for a problem created at the national level” (Regen Studio, 2026). Microgrids are well understood. The remarkable part is the governance. The City of The Hague sits in the same cooperative as a beach bar. They share risks, decisions, and rewards. That is not how energy systems typically work. It was also built years before grid congestion became a national crisis, which is part of why it works: the governance had time to mature before the stakes rose.

Across Europe, more than 8,000 energy communities now enable citizens to collectively invest in, generate, and manage clean energy (European Commission, 2025). The Netherlands has 714 cooperatives with 130,000 members and cooperative wind capacity projected to reach 389 MW by 2025–26 (Lokale Energie Monitor/HIER, 2024). Denmark mandates 20% local ownership of wind projects. The UK committed £1 billion in February 2026 through its Local Power Plan, targeting 1,000 community-owned projects by 2030 (UK Government, 2026).

The emissions case is real. Project Drawdown’s current analysis estimates that distributed solar PV, the broader category within which community energy operates, could avoid 2.80 to 3.50 gigatons of CO₂-equivalent per year at achievable adoption levels (Project Drawdown, 2026). For context, utility-scale solar is assessed at 9.2 to 11 gigatons per year (Project Drawdown, 2026).* Community energy will not out-scale centralised infrastructure, and the case for it does not rest on capacity. Grid decarbonisation is a democratic infrastructure project as much as a technical one. It requires systems in which citizens are participants in the transition’s design, beneficiaries of its economics, and co-owners of its risks. The history of development interventions teaches a consistent lesson: solutions that bypass local agency may succeed in the short term but tend to collapse in the long term. Community energy is an attempt to take that lesson seriously within the energy system.

Two Major Challenges

1. An infrastructure failure requiring political patience. Cooperatives cannot access capital on the terms available to commercial developers. Their business models sit on volatile energy prices and subsidy schemes, and they run on volunteer governance, which limits the complexity of what they can undertake. But in the Netherlands, a more fundamental problem blocks progress: the grid itself is full. Regional operators hold over 14,000 connection requests on waiting lists totalling 9 GW; TenneT holds another 212 requests at 38 GW (Minister Hermans, Parliamentary Letter, February 2026). A cooperative can develop a solar project and find it physically cannot connect. The social cost of this congestion has been estimated at €10–40 billion (BCG, cited in Hermans, 2026). This is not a market failure that better pricing can resolve. It is an infrastructure failure that requires building things: cables, substations, transformer capacity. That takes time, money, and the kind of political patience that electoral cycles do not reward. In the UK, prior to the Local Power Plan, the picture was different in form but similar in effect: fragmented, short-term grant funding with high early-stage failure rates. The ambition existed. The architecture to sustain it did not.

2. The equity gap, or the model’s potential hypocrisy. Community energy flourishes where social capital is already high: wealthier communities, homeowners, older demographics. Research across multiple European countries confirms this consistently (Neij et al., 2025). Renters, younger people, and lower-income households carry the heaviest energy cost burden and are systematically underrepresented. In the Netherlands, TNO research has identified grid congestion as a distributive justice issue: residents without private driveways or home charging infrastructure are disproportionately excluded from the electric vehicle transition, and the same structural logic applies to community energy participation (TNO, 2026). The democratic claim is what distinguishes community energy from utility-scale renewables. If that claim cannot be substantiated, if “community” in practice means affluent homeowners with time and capital, then the model risks becoming less a democratisation of the energy system than a new form of enclosure. I think the model is worth pursuing, which is exactly why the hypocrisy has to be named.

Strategies to Address These Challenges

Institutional architecture, not just funding. The UK’s Local Power Plan is instructive not primarily for its £1 billion price tag but for its structure: a “Community Energy in a Box” toolkit, an advisory service, a blended investment fund, and a plan to consult on mandatory shared ownership under the 2015 Infrastructure Act (UK Government, 2026). This addresses the persistent problem that community groups possess ambition but lack the legal, financial, and technical capacity to execute. As of January 2026, the GBE Community Fund had provided early-stage funding to over 60 projects across England.

Regulatory reform that repositions communities as market participants. The Netherlands’ Energy Act, in force since 1 January 2026, creates legal space for energy hubs, microgrids, and local energy sharing, enabling cooperatives to participate in the energy market on terms previously reserved for commercial actors (Chambers & Partners, 2026). Denmark’s mandated local ownership remains the benchmark. These reforms change who the energy system recognises as a legitimate participant. A cooperative that is legally invisible to the energy market cannot participate in it, regardless of how much solar capacity it owns.

Flexibility as economic agency. Slim Strandnet demonstrates that cooperatives can earn revenue from congestion management as well as from generation, using batteries, smart charging, and demand response to balance local grids. The Dutch Grid Congestion Campaign recognises that flexibility from batteries and charging infrastructure is underutilised (Hermans, 2026). In a congested grid, a cooperative that can shave demand peaks becomes part of the system’s operating infrastructure.

Organisations Working in This Space

Slim Strandnet, Scheveningen is the local proof of concept, a governance innovation as much as a technology project. The cooperative places the City of The Hague alongside beach entrepreneurs (Strandpaviljoen Aloha, The Shore, HITO) on equal terms. It uses circular, demountable solar panels from Dutch startup Biosphere Solar. When the Live on the Beach music festival ran on the microgrid’s sustainable energy instead of diesel generators, approximately 3,500 kWh of renewable energy powered the event (Regen Studio, 2026). The new Energy Act now enables this kind of energy sharing at scale, which turns Slim Strandnet from a one-off into a template.

Energie Samen (energiesamen.nu) is the Dutch federation of energy communities, representing 714 cooperatives, citizens making their homes sustainable, and private wind operators at national and regional level. Energie Samen has been instrumental in shaping the legislative environment that now enables community energy to grow. Chair Siward Zomer has articulated the core insight: local generation and distribution can simultaneously strengthen communities and reduce grid congestion, and this is gaining real traction among policymakers (Lokale Energie Monitor, 2024). The organisation sits between cooperative practice and policymaking, translating what cooperatives learn on the ground into regulatory language. A background in law and economics, eight languages, and years of convening across sectors are useful in exactly this bridging role. It is the space I want to be part of.

A Justice Consideration

Amartya Sen distinguished between “culmination outcomes” (did the target number get hit?) and “comprehensive outcomes” (what happened to people along the way?). The energy transition is in danger of treating gigatons reduced as the sole metric of success, without asking who bore the costs and who captured the benefits.

Community energy, at its best, addresses this directly: by keeping economic value local, giving citizens governance rights, and building capacity in communities rather than extracting from them. At its worst, it replicates existing inequalities under a democratic veneer. The essential justice requirement is that every policy enabling community energy must simultaneously ensure inclusion: through mandatory shared ownership in large-scale renewable projects, cooperative models designed for renters and social housing, and honest recognition that what works in Scheveningen may not work in contexts with deeper poverty or weaker institutions.

In India, this recognition is already producing its own solutions. Organisations such as Gram Oorja operate community solar microgrids governed by Village Energy Committees, often women-led, that set tariffs and manage operations in communities where the national grid is absent or unreliable. On 30 March 2026, the day this paper was written, India’s Deccan Chronicle published an article proposing village-level microgrids owned by gram panchayats as a path to energy self-governance, arguing that villages should produce, manage, and trade electricity rather than merely consume it. The democratic impulse behind community energy is not a European invention. It surfaces independently, in different forms, wherever people conclude that who owns the energy system determines who benefits from it. The justice frame in India is about access rather than ownership, but the underlying principle converges: energy governance should be shaped by those it serves. Both frames are necessary, and a transition that claims to be just must hold them together, even when they pull in different directions.