New publication: Rural energy communities: bridging local action and clean energy transition

• by OEGA
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Rural territories across Europe stand at a crossroads. Decades of demographic decline, energy poverty, and the structural marginalisation of local knowledge have left deep imprints on rural communities. At the same time, the accelerating need for a clean energy transition is generating new pressures on these same territories — and new possibilities. Large-scale renewable energy deployment, when driven by external corporate interests and disconnected from local governance, reproduces the extractive logics that have long disadvantaged rural areas. Yet when designed from the bottom up, anchored in community ownership and participatory process, the energy transition can become a genuine vehicle for rural revitalisation: generating local employment, reducing energy poverty, strengthening community bonds, and restoring to rural inhabitants a measure of sovereignty over the resources of their own territories.

This scientific volume gathers contributions presented at the European Conference of the EC4RURAL project, held on 1 October 2025 at the Faculty of Philology and Translation of the University of Vigo. The event brought together around 80 participants from 20 countries, including representatives of energy communities and local action groups, researchers, associations, local and regional authorities, and practitioners committed to a citizen-led clean energy transition.

The book can be downloaded freely through the following link.