What knowledge and skills are crucial for setting up and/or joining energy communities? What are the knowledge barriers for energy citizenship? How to provide reliable information and facilitate access to energy knowledge for citizens and communities? Easily available, understandable and reliable information plays a central role in strengthening energy citizenship and energy communities. There is a large gap in knowledge and skills (managerial, financial, and technological) between authorities and market actors who govern the energy systems, and citizens who seek to join or set-up and manage energy communities. On one hand, support at the information level and the operational level is needed. On the other hand, there is simultaneously a need to simplify and harmonize legal structures.

The Knowledge-module provides you with

• structured understanding of different types of knowledge barriers for community energy and other citizen-led energy actions,
• examples of knowledge and information services and tools in European and national level for supporting the setting up and mainstreaming of community energy, and
• reflection on how to apply integrated approaches to knowledge in different contexts.

The instructors in this module are

Negar Ghezel Sefloo is a post-doc researcher at the Institute of Public Law and Political Science at the University of Graz. She is part of the EC² project team and her work consists mainly of elaborating policy recommendations and communicating findings to policy makers and civil society. Her research interests lie at the intersection of natural sciences and law, with a particular focus on energy communities and the regulation of sustainable agriculture and smart farming to accelerate sustainability goals.

Yu-Yi Huynh is a Just Transition Officer at ICLEI Europe, a network of local governments for sustainability. She focuses on how participatory democracy, intersectional approaches and bottom-up initiatives, paired with enabling governance structures, can help in implementing European sustainability goals efficiently and inclusively. She leads the work on policy recommendations and capacity building in the EC²-project.