German Stakeholder Desk Meeting of COME RES Project

On September 30, 2021, the Environmental Policy Research Centre of the Freie Universität Berlin together with the Thuringian Energy and GreenTech Agency (ThEGA) hosted the second regular meeting of the German stakeholder desk in the context of the H2020 project COME RES. The German desk concentrates on community wind energy and community integrated solutions. It involves a core group of approx. 40 stakeholders and a wider group of roughly 120 stakeholders.

The meeting targeted all entities and actors involved and/or interested in the implementation of RECs in Germany, including energy communities, cooperatives, municipal entities, energy agencies, associations and interest groups, public authorities and other political and energy market actors.

Considering the implementation of the Renewable Energy Directive (RED II) in Germany, this stakeholder dialogue referred to the Directive's provisions regarding renewable energy communities and good practices.

In the context of the stakeholder desk meeting, Prof. Jens Lowitzsch of Viadrina-Universität Frankfurt (Oder) presented the CSOP model and the experiences of the SCORE pilot project in Essen.

Further presentations were made by Dr. Rosaria Di Nucci and Michael Krug, illustrating the progress of the COME RES project and presenting preliminary results. Furthermore, good practice examples ranging from the cooperation between municipal utility companies (Stadtwerke) and energy cooperatives in the wind farm Uthleben (Thuringia) were presented and discussed. A further topic was the planned citizens' energy fund in Thuringia.