Meet the City of Eeklo, one of the winners of the European Social Innovation Competition 2023.
Learn more about the competition here: eic.ec.europa.eu/eic-prizes/e...
The city of Eeklo in Belgium works closely with local citizen-energy cooperatives to ensure access to affordable, local, renewable energy for its citizens. Since 2000 several wind turbines were developed on public grounds of the city by the citizen-energy cooperatives Ecopower and Volterra. This way over 500 households (5% of total households) in Eeklo became member of the cooperatives in the last 20 years.
As a city they want that their local energy is available for every citizen, especially households in energy poverty as they could benefit even more of lower energy prices from the cooperative Ecopower (that has a suppliers permit in Flanders). But becoming member of the cooperative means becoming shareholder by investing €250 euro in the cooperative, a financial barrier which makes membership out of reach for a lot of families in energy poverty. The city of Eeklo and Ecopower are setting up social energy shares to overcome this financial barrier. They work closely with social services to identify households with difficulties to pay their energy bill and help them transfer to the cooperative supplier if they are interested.