The project “Promotion of energy communities” aims to provide tools to facilitate the proliferation of self-consumption facilities from the experience of a specific municipality, with the aim of collecting learnings, suggestions and methodologies replicable in the rest of the municipalities of the whole of Spain.

The municipality of Sabadell has been selected for the project given its availability to actively participate from the departments of Housing, Environment and Social Services, as well as proposing a neighbourhood community to carry out participatory activities and make them monitoring. This municipality has already actively participated in the project “Neighbourhood communities for energy efficiency” and is considered a good ally for the implementation of the proposed project. At the time of writing the next project proposal, work is being done with the Environment Department of Sabadell City Council, for a possible inclusion in the project of a community of neighbours where an installation will be made. collective self-consumption, as a pilot project subsidized by the Diputació de Barcelona.

On a monthly basis, from October 2019 to October 2020, a series of meetings have been held with the selected neighbourhood community, the residents’ associations, social entities and the Housing, Environment and Social Services Departments, with technical, legal and administrative advice from the Som Energia technical team, as well as their participation in some of the meetings. The meetings had an informative format and offered training on the current legislation and regulation of collective self-consumption, as well as information to break some false myths about photovoltaic. The central part of the meetings was dedicated to the active participation of the participants: weaknesses, strengths, threats and opportunities were collected, following the points of view of the different actors involved. The aim was to co-create new proposals, methodologies and aid mechanisms to be able to carry out collective self-consumption projects.

Plan and schedule meetings with the neighbourhood and the City Council, extract the information to develop the content to be included in the communication materials on energy communities, as well as design and produce them.

• Improve the relationship between neighbourhood communities and the city council, to move from a model of individual and mostly uninformed relationships to a collective model, where the actors are empowered.
• Establish methodological steps for all project actors to become agents of change for the energy transition, and to feel able to promote collective self-consumption.

• Neighbourhood communities against energy poverty