Community Power has won the Citizens’ Award at the EU Sustainable Energy Week 2020 for our Community-based Virtual Power Plant Project (cVPP). Photo taken at a meeting of Irish cVPP sub partners pre-lockdown

 

We are delighted to announce that Community Power has won the Citizens’ Award at the EU Sustainable Energy Week 2020 for our Community-based Virtual Power Plant Project (cVPP). Community Power is Ireland’s first community owned electricity supplier and is fully licenced by the CRU.

What is a Community-based Virtual Power Plant? Basically, it’s about putting communities in charge of their local renewable energy generation. The project is looking to empower small-scale local renewable energy producers and revolutionise the way electricity systems work. This community generation project takes into account the interests of community-based renewable energy producers, or ‘prosumers’, like a small group of village-owned wind turbines or rooftop solar panels.

Gregg Allen, CEO Community Power said ‘We are delighted that Community Virtual Power Plant (cVPP) has won the Citizens’ Award as part of the EU Sustainable Energy Awards. It is very pleasing that the combined efforts of our Irish partners in this project has been recognised by Europe as a practical demonstration of how communities and citizens can engage in the electricity market at a local level and facilitate greater citizen participation in the energy transition.

The consortium of Irish Partners include; Community Power,  Templederry Windfarm, Tipperary Energy Agency (TEA), Friends of the Earth, Smart M Power along with our community partners, Energy Communities Tipperary Co-operative (ECTC), Aran Island Energy Co-op, Claremorris Energy Co-op and Tait House Social Enterprise Limerick all of whom have been actively promoting community energy initiatives in their local area’.

You can watch a recording of the announcement in the video below where our partner from Eindhoven University,  in The Netherlands, Anna J Wieczorek, accepts the award (virtually) on behalf of all the partners.

Householders and businesses are being urged to switch their electricity supplier to Community Power to further enable the work being carried out to assist communities and citizens to generate their own power. Anybody can switch via our website, just click here and follow the steps or phone 067-56005.

To read more about the CVPP Project click here