Doing energy democracy - cooperatively
What we can learn from Amsterdam Energie
Dear reader,
welcome back to another issue of The Social Life of Energy, the newsletter for those who want to get smart about fast and fair sustainable energy transitions. Not a reader yet? Sign up here!
For today’s issue I sat down with Thijs de Jong, campaign manager at energy cooperative Amsterdam Energie (Facebook, Instragram, Twitter). We talked about what it means to do energy cooperatively, what promise it holds for energy democracy and what challenges it faces along the way. The text below is set of translated excerpts. The full interview is also available, here, in Dutch.
Communicating the idea of the energy cooperative
Last issue we saw the learned that the ‘real’ message of cooperative energy cooperative – ownership of the mean of energy production – resonated the least with (potential) members in the north of the Netherlands. Thijs recognize that challenge.
Marten
One of your pitches seems to be that you can ‘empower’ people.
Thijs
“Turn you into a boss” (“Baas maakt”) 😉
Marten
Can you tell me something about that campaign and how people respond to it?
Thijs
Yes, ‘being a boss’ is basically an exciting version of the cooperative idea. Namely, put simply, every member has the same voting power, so you’re all equally boss of the club. It also means being fully transparent about the financial flows and when it comes to profit, we decide together as members about where we want to re-invest it. In that sense, you’re the boss of your cooperative and at the same time, the boss over your own energy. Ordinarily, energy is a product that you just take as a consumer, which is actually quite strange for something as fundamental to our society as energy. So if you can become a boss over it…
At the same time, that’s still a fairly new idea. So that message can be a little confusing. Some people will respond like, ‘But can I still get my energy from you?’ Or: ‘So I can just become a customer of yours, right?’ Basically, ‘Can I please just be a consumer?’ (Haha).
Many cooperatives, including our national umbrella, therefore prefer the term ‘customer’, because it puts energy delivery first and having a voice second. At Amsterdam Energy we still like to talk of “members”, because we feel it’s distinctive. But then, in marketing terms, what do you say: “become a member”? Cause people don’t necessarily get that, thinking maybe you’re some kind of environmental organization. So we settled on “join” [“word lid”]. We’re not going to say: “buy from us” [“word klant” – “become a customer”; the dilemma doesn’t quite translate to English, where you’re probably invited to “sign up” for a service, regardless – MB]. It’s a bit of a compromise, you want to do justice to what you stand for, but you want people to easily understand it too.
The intangibility of energy
Another communicative challenge Thijs mentioned is that energy isn’t really tangible. How do you make your core cause more relatable?
Thijs
Do you remember that commercial about fossil fuel from the socket? Like, ‘Wow, the air is stale in here’. I thought that was pretty funny.
Marten
Haha
Thijs
‘Cause that’s of course not how it works, haha. Like, sniff sniff, we have capitalist electricity! Well, you can make it tangible through the projects we run. The solar panel crowdfunding project, but also trying to fund our own wind turbine, these evoke very clear images for people, and it allows you to talk about numbers, like the number of household you can serve with them. And then you do make it tangible.
Marten
By…
Thijs
By being able to bike through the city, pass certain buildings and knowing ‘this is where our solar panels are, this is where we are generating renewable energy!’ A part of the power we supply comes from the harbour, with wind turbines. Well, a lot of Amsterdam inhabitants know the harbour and its turbines, so that also evokes a certain image, like, that’s where our power comes from.
There is quite a bit in the literature about ‘energy being intangible’. There is a good body of evidence that the opportunity to engage practically with energy (whether through quantification or visualization) does change people’s ideas about the energy system (and in particular, that it predisposes people to think of energy more in sustainability terms. See also this earlier post). If you’d like to read more about that, let me know.
In the meanwhile, you can read this latest post from fellow Substack publication Minimum Viable Planet, which also dealt with precisely this question.
Realizing new infrastructure
Currently, Amsterdam and other regions are assessing their potential for renewable energy. Smaller parties like Amsterdam Energie are waiting to see which areas wind up being slated for potential wind development.
Thijs
Once the municipality and the province decide which locations satisfy minimal conditions for turbines, it’s very important to involve citizens from the very beginning. And a very good way to involve them is through cooperative. If you think in terms of energy democracy, that when you give people a say, and ownerships, you create the conditions for (local) public support. Then it’s not just about the climate that we’re fixing, it’s also the inhabitants who benefit from a wind turbine in their environment.
Marten
You’ve also seen this with your own eyes [that having a say creates public support – MB], or is this your expectation of what would happen? Have you seen this ‘in action’, as it were?
Thijs
I have seen it in other places in The Netherlands. Whether I can give you a specific example on the spot though… Well, recently in Utrecht, the council decided it wanted to develop a (solar) energy park with a cooperative, precisely because it would allow them to involve the surrounding residents.
Marten
Is there a (meaningful) alternative to involve residents?
Thijs
Yeah, bound to be no? Haha, I’m looking at you, maybe you know better than I do?
Marten
Er, just thinking out loud: if it’s mandatory for a power company or utility to establish a fund [that funnels part of the profits to] the immediate surrounding residents when they build an energy park.
Thijs
Yeah, there’s also kinds of hybrid forms. Doesn’t have to be a consortium, but some sort of cooperation between utilities and cooperatives. That’s how we get our wind energy, after all, in cooperation between the Harbour, the utility [Eneco], and Amsterdam Energie. The turbines aren’t ours, but we get a share of the energy.
Yeah, that’s one way to do it, simply because energy cooperatives aren’t usually particularly cash rich. And now there’s the national agreement [The Climate Accord – MB] that 50% of all new energy sources should in owned by the public. That’s a great ambition. But how to make it happen? Well, you could say, for every two new turbines, one has to be ‘cooperative’. But you could also say, we’re building two wind turbines, owned jointly 50/50 by a cooperative and a power company.
I’ll come back to this question of whether or when these co-ownership arrangements work next week!
Working with homeowners’ associations and housing corporations
In the meanwhile, let’s address a different topic: working with housing corporations and homeowner associations. In terms of retrofitting (and in this case: applying solar panels at scale), in many countries these institutions are key passage points, so I was curious about Amsterdam Energie’s experience in this case. They completed a crowdfunding scheme to lay PV panels on 750 houses in a mixed corporations building. Could he draw any lessons from the experience?
Thijs
So, first of all, we deal primarily with homeowners’ associations. The association can be mixed, with the housing corporations on the board, but can also be completely private. Our experience has taught us that housing corporations like to maintain control and aren’t very excited about a third party coming to take this out of their hands. And I can see where they are coming from: their primary objective is to provide housing and they’re under pressure from more than one side: they’ve been forced to contribute a sizeable portion of their asset fund to the national budget, while the municipality makes all sorts of sustainability and other demands of them. So they’re kind of in between a rock and a hard place. The fact that we managed to pull off the Marcanti location, with the residents and the housing corporations [Ymere], in a mixed homeowner’s association, to get permission to use the roofs: that’s exceptional. Years of work went into that.
Often, even though the corporations are no longer the (sole) owners of the roofs [now co-owned by the residents who purchased an apartment in the building – MB], they still often behave as if they were. Of course, they tend to have a major stake in the Association, 40%, 50%, or even more – and they are usually well-represented in the member meetings. So that’s hard. If they are not on board, it’s really hard. That’s why we don’t every try with rental-only corporation buildings, because they want to do that on their own.
I think it’s all about the finances. They have a list of their duties, and there’s little left further down the list. Even though, as I mentioned early, by crowdfunding the panels, they don’t actually have to pay for anything.
Marten
So… what’s stopping them?
Thijs
They’re used to roll out projects at big scales. To refurbish five buildings in a neighbourhood, one, two, three in the same way. It’s an unwieldy, more bureaucratic kind of apparatus.
Marten
Any lessons: it took years this time, but next time could be faster?
Thijs
Well, if you can present a success story, that makes a difference. If you can show this to other homeowners’ associations, ‘look, this is our experience with the project’, it will be much easier.
At the same, and this is just as important: every Association has its own dynamics, different residents with different relations. That means that there’s no one size fits all.
Not incidentally, the lesson we shared with you last issue as well!
Alright, that wraps it up for today! I hope you enjoyed the interview and learned somethine new.
Do you know of anybody else who might have valuable lessons to share? Someone involved in an interesting project? Someone I should interview? Let me know!
For now, thanks to Thijs for talking to me! If you’d like to get in touch with him, drop him a line! If you want to ask him a question that you think might also be valuable for the rest of us: leave a comment!