Find out more
Read more about the E2-CUTIES project here.
Codema attends 4th consortium meeting for E2-CUTIES in Strasbourg
From the 29th September – 1st October, 2026, partners from the Interreg North-West Europe (NWE) E2-CUTIES project met in Strasbourg, France, for the project’s 4th consortium meeting. E2-CUTIES aims to empower local energy communities by creating a step-based roadmap and a method to create investment propositions, helping them overcome the common challenges faced in relation to governance, community inclusion, technical expertise and legal and financial barriers.
Purpose of the activity
Last week Codema attended Strasbourg for the 4th Partner Meeting of the Interreg North-West Europe (NWE) E2-CUTIES project. Alongside Codema’s Dublin project partners, Fingal County Council and Balbriggan Sustainable Energy Community (SEC), almost 40 other colleagues from citizen initiatives, local authorities, research institutes and support organisations from Strasbourg, Utrecht, Leuven and Copenhagen also joined!
Over the course of the few days we discussed:
- The levels of participation within energy communities, their potential to build social connections amongst communities and methods of engagement that worked well to mobilise the wider community
- Different methods for attracting investment in energy communities and the steps that are necessary in preparing for those discussions
- How best to track, monitor, share and improve our learnings and processes on this new journey to enhance the governance relationship between Fingal County Council and Balbriggan SEC
Codema’s role in this activity
Codema attended as the lead for the Balbriggan Dublin pilot site and as the lead of WP2 of the E2-CUTIES project.
From a Dublin perspective, the project is helping to explore and (for the first time) test new ways of working between Fingal County Council and the Balbriggan Sustainable Energy Community (SEC), while also supporting the further development of the Balbriggan Decarbonising Zone plan.
Codema staff took part in sessions covering topics from governance and technical tool implementation to community building. Sarah also shared insights on stakeholder engagement, highlighting the importance of listening first and then framing climate action around what genuinely motivates each stakeholder.
It was a valuable opportunity to learn from partners and citizen energy initiatives in Strasbourg, Utrecht and Leuven, where community energy projects are already well established.
Key outcomes from this activity
Some of the key takeaways were clear: building and mobilising a community takes time, creating new processes will take time, failures and eventually successes. But the important thing is we are learning.
Just as importantly, the process is helping to identify what effective governance and collaboration between the local authority and the SEC can look like in practice. Capturing the challenges, successes and lessons from how both sides work together – including roles, responsibilities, communication and decision-making – can help strengthen the partnership in Balbriggan and provide useful learning for similar community energy projects elsewhere.
