The 1st Energy Community breakfast session highlighted the case of the Novi Otok energy cooperative in Croatia as well as providing national context about the energy community landscape in Croatia. Key points covered in the session are included below:
• Novi Otok focus on empowering people and are adapting into a new decentralised system as they are based on an island.
• Ivan presented tips and tricks that he felt were important for energy communities, particularly in their early stages:
- Relying on proven technologies to ensure investment and gain interest from citizens, before then looking to shift behaviour
- Investing in both small and large projects
- Synergy of sectors
- Continuous dialogue with members
- Focussing on direct needs of local citizens to build community trust
• They focussed on PV as a proven technology and have put PV installations on the local library.
• Ivan also spoke about EUCF utilised / SECAP and an online platform for local impact investments.
The cooperative are promoting crowdfunding as a means of generating the necessary financing for the energy cooperative. Both through investors and community members.
More information: https://wayback.archive-it.org/12090/20240320084824/https://rural-energy-community-hub.ec.europa.eu/index_en
