Community energy pioneers: Tábor prepares for sharing, apartment buildings left out

Tábor’s energy community should be established by the end of this year. The project’s annual generation is expected to reach 1,100 megawatt-hours.

Czech customers have been able to share electricity among themselves for a year now. So far, community energy has been driven mainly by people in local governments. However, in a highly centralised energy market, developing non-profit alternatives to electricity generation and distribution is not easy.

The situation is complicated by legal, economic and subsidy uncertainty, as well as reluctance from electricity distributors and suppliers. Community energy pioneers therefore know they will have to put in the work to get things off the ground. Despite all the obstacles, they believe it will be worth it.

74 entities to join

The development of community energy depends on the interest and political support of local leadership, especially mayors. “The one-third model applies here. One-third of mayors are innovative, forward-looking and like new things. The bottom third tend to look backwards, and anything new is almost a nuisance to them. The final third are somewhere in between. It is important to work with the innovative third and try to win over as much of the neutral third as possible,” says Jiří Krist, vice-chair of the National Network of Local Action Groups and chair of the Opavsko Local Action Group.

We meet Jiří Krist in Tábor during the Local Action Groups conference. One of the speakers is Daniel Urbánek, energy manager at Bytes, Tábor’s municipal company. Tábor’s energy community should be established by the end of this year and involve 74 entities, mainly municipal companies and publicly funded organisations.

“This project will have annual generation of around 1,100 megawatt-hours. I like to draw the parallel that one of Temelín’s units generates that much in an hour,” Urbánek says with a smile.

It was technically challenging

Bytes Tábor originally had bigger ambitions: to involve apartment buildings in electricity sharing as well. However, it ultimately reconsidered its plans. “It was technically challenging. We had only a few months to meet the subsidy deadlines. If there had been less time pressure, we could have been more ambitious,” Urbánek explains. The Environment Ministry subsidy covered the administrative costs of setting up the community.

The call for this subsidy was published in November 2023 – before the Chamber of Deputies approved Lex OZE II. The supported activities are due to be completed by the end of this year. The call thus illustrates the unpredictability of the legal and subsidy environment for community energy in Czechia.

In Tábor, the short deadlines turned the community energy project more into a municipal energy project. Jiří Krist, whose Enerkom Opavsko is among the very first energy communities in Czechia, gently criticises Tábor for this. In his view, involving households is a prerequisite for energy communities to be able to tackle energy poverty. “If a city is facing surpluses, what could be more obvious than offering the electricity to socially disadvantaged people?” he asks.

Market decentralisation

Community energy pioneers are entering a market that has until now been in the hands of a few major players, with little motivation to facilitate the development of decentralised non-profit alternatives. Indeed, there was strong lobbying by distributors and business associations representing some electricity suppliers against the adoption of the permissive Lex OZE II law.

Most Czech power plants are owned by the semi-state company ČEZ, followed by billionaire Pavel Tykač’s Sev.en, Sokolovská uhelná and Daniel Křetínský’s EPH. Electricity distribution to households in Czechia is handled by three distribution companies. ČEZ covers most of the country. In southern Moravia and southern Bohemia, electricity is distributed by E.ON through its distribution company EG.D. In Prague, it is Pražská energetika, indirectly owned by the city. Suppliers, of which there are around 350 in Czechia, buy electricity and sell it to end users.

Electricity distributors are indispensable for sharing and, as shareholders in the Electricity Data Centre, are meant to facilitate it. However, communities do not always encounter a helpful approach.

They refuse to connect renewable energy sources, on which energy communities depend, to the distribution grid, or delay their connection. They cite insufficient grid capacity. According to Ondřej Pašek, coordinator of the Hnutí Duha Energy Cooperative, the capacity problem is real, but Czech distributors could generally have been better prepared to connect renewable sources, whose development has long been endorsed by government strategies.

Electricity in their own hands

This June’s heatwave showed how unpleasant life in Czechia will become in the future if the world’s dependence on fossil fuels cannot be reduced. According to Eurostat data for the first quarter of this year, Czechia ranked last in the entire European Union for the use of renewable energy sources.

Israel’s and the United States’ attacks on Iran, and subsequent concerns about the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of the world’s oil flows, in turn showed how unpredictable the global electricity market is at a time of growing global instability. Czechia also faces the risk of higher electricity prices linked to disruptions in liquefied gas supplies. Communities therefore benefit from taking at least part of energy generation into their own hands by building renewable sources and sharing energy locally.

“Over the long term, it is an investment in the stability of cities, self-sufficiency and greater control over their own costs,” comments Marek Mareda (Pirates), Tábor’s deputy mayor responsible for energy. The local council supported the establishment of a local energy community coordinated by Bytes this June. However, the development of energy communities in Czechia depends on whether the state can establish stable legal conditions and ensure sufficient financial support. Investments in energy modernisation still predominantly flow into the pockets of major players.