Energy Community Avedøre (ECA) is Denmark’s first citizen energy community, founded on August 18, 2020, under the name Energifællesskab Avedøre A.M.B.A. The energy community emerged as part of the local development plan called “Avedøre Green City”, which was formed in 2018 based on the initiative of three public housing organizations in Avedøre Stationsby. Avedøre Green City has to date received €61 million targeting projects that relate to UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To this end, sustainable energy has been highlighted as one of the key goals, which has led to the establishment of the energy community in which local stakeholders have collective ownership over the production, distribution, and consumption of energy. ECA is organized around an organizational model emerging from the new EU directive in 2018, which provides citizens with the opportunity to participate in a climate-friendly transformation of their local energy supplies.  

The initial goal and purpose of ECA as an organizational model was to build a local network for the production, distribution and consumption of sustainable energy. Following the principles outlined in the EU directive, the aim is more concretely to leverage the ECA by building a range of local energy infrastructure projects, such as electric charging station, heat pumps, and solar panels, which allows the local community to be self-sustaining in terms of its energy needs. By relying on its own locally generated energy, ECA furthermore also anticipates lowered electricity costs, which in turn can generate a financial surplus that can be reinvested into the further expansion of the local energy infrastructure.

The broader logic of energy communities, which originates from the EU directive, is to accelerate the green transition by encouraging decentralized networks of actors (such as local communities) to invest in green energy infrastructure. To this end, ECA will operate as a local aggregator, referring to a system that combines, integrates, and coordinates distributed energy resources (e.g. solar panels, batteries, and heat pumps). Through this aggregator system, ECA will optimize the local grid stability and, by extension, contribute to the overall sustainability of the local energy infrastructure. By creating such decentralized energy grids, energy communities will furthermore also offload the pressure from the collective energy grid and ensure that it is run more efficiently, e.g. by using energy that is locally produced rather than transporting them over long distances (transmission losses, infrastructure maintenance costs, energy reliability/security, etc.).

Hvidovre Municipality, in which Avedøre Green City and ECA is located, is a key stakeholder in ECA, which is a member of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group that has pledged to combat climate change through the reduction of greenhouse gases. Avedøre Green City and ECA are important organizational levers through which Hvidovre Municipality expects to meet its target of reducing its CO2 emissions by 80% in 2035 and to achieve CO2-neutrality by 2045.