That was the main topic of the event jointly organized by Flux50, ODE, Technlink, VITO and COGEN Vlaanderen on october 13 in Ghent at which WeSmart had the honour to be invited to share its expertise in the field.
As mentioned, the event was split between:
- theoretical expertise on energy communities: How it is legally defined by the European regulatory framework? How can the privacy of participants to energy communities be respected? Which specificities to be aware of in Brussels?
- Concrete examples of active energy communities like GreenBizz
On this occasion, and after 5 years working at CwApe, Boniface, our Energy project manager, could not only share with the audience his theoretical knowledge of the legal framework to build up a community but also the practical knowledge of how he concretely implemented the GreenBizz.energy community along with the WeSmart team.
Surprisingly enough, despite our previous experiences and knowledge of the energy sector, we went a long way towards the creation of our first energy community in Brussels. So this Tuesday Boniface could proudly announce that we overcame all hurdles to finally found our first renewable energy community.
Greenbizz.energy is actually:
- made of 40 companies and 20 workshops
- sharing 203 Mwh per year
- produced by our 943 solar panels
The 3 main lessons we learnt :
- It might be commonplace, but we truly learned that to put into practice our theoretical background was tougher than expected.
That is the reason why we decided to be resilient and work according to a test and learn approach based on cycles. - It is crucial to ensure great solidarity and trust among all participants to an energy community and between them and their energy community manager.
This is why WeSmart decided to make transparency its priority. - The toughest part is currently to find participants whose production and consumption profiles match and willing to join an energy community. This explains why we decided to create interactive, fun and pedagogical webinars, events and workshops to explain concretely what is an energy community and what are your interests to join one.
More lessons learnt are coming since we intend to go further by extending our energy community to 400 inhabitants in the Tivoli sustainable neighborhood as well as 2 schools
Stay posted!
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