How was the 2025 International Year of Cooperatives for you and your organisation?
The 2025 international year of the co-operatives has four key aims: 1) raising awareness, 2) promoting growth, 3) advocating for supportive legal frameworks and 4) inspiring leadership and young people. REScoop has made clear progress in each area.
In May REScoop welcomed 180 people from 42 countries to our annual conference in Krakow. A representative from Ukraine opened the event. She spoke about how Ukraine’s citizens discovered the dangers of a traditional centralised energy system.
This reinforces our belief that a sustainable energy transition should be both decentralised and democratically managed – something that’s been acknowledged by the European Parliament’s INI report on Grids.
Our Forum Declaration set out our intention to support community energy groups, and we’ve seen many more inspiring projects. From district heating in the Netherlands to new projects in Cyprus and Croatia there’s a real sense of purpose across our sector.
We’ve welcomed new members, with more co-operatives joining from Eastern Europe. We’ve seen new models develop with energy communities working alongside with local authorities.
Related: Energy4All chair elected Rescoop.eu president as part of new board
Existing members have developed new projects. Som Energia in Catalonia just celebrated its 15th birthday. Our successful ACCE project shared best practice in financing mechanisms in six countries, and we’ve been developing our cross-border financing mechanism: MECISE.
We are supporting 70 new co-operative energy projects with the launch of our community energy facility, and we hope to launch a similar number in 2026.
We had the first high level European Parliament event with cross party support and recognition that community energy can contribute to energy affordability and security.
Having highlighted the importance decentralised energy generation, we successfully advocated for communities to have priority in connecting their projects to the grid.
We are looking forward to new guidance on this issue in the forthcoming EU Grids package.
Dirk Vansintjan was REScoop’s first and founding president, over the last eight years he has given us consistent and ethical direction, encouragement and a strong sense of values that have underpinned our movement.
We elected a fresh board in 2025, with a new president and vice-president and a different generation of leaders stepping into our gender balanced and age diverse board. Our movement now represents over 2 million European citizens and 2,500 energy co-operatives.
We have big challenges ahead. We will need to ensure community energy remains a focus of the next European Parliament when it agrees a new budget framework and financing mechanisms.
Behind all this – we firmly believe a sustainable energy transition is only built on co-operative principles.
