News
Energy Community Insights: Greece's National Coalition
The Life COMET project aims to transform the community energy landscape in Central and Eastern Europe through assessment, experience sharing, and coalition building. Our series of blog posts “Energy Community Insights: A Tour of Central & Eastern Europe” explores the emergence and growth of national coalitions of energy communities in Croatia, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovenia.
This blog post introduces Greece’s national coalition of energy communities: Desmi, offering an overview of the coalition’s vision and efforts, along with a personal perspective from its president, Dimitris Kitsikopoulos.
Greece’s Community Energy Coalition
The Greek national coalition of energy communities, Desmi, is a newly established but rapidly growing alliance of energy communities, NGOs, experts, and academic institutions. Formally founded in December 2023, the coalition seeks to create an enabling ecosystem for citizen-led energy initiatives. It emerged from the realization that individual energy communities alone could not overcome systemic obstacles in Greece’s energy sector.
Desmi is engaged in multiple areas: advocating for supportive national legislation, contributing to policy design and monitoring, building capacity through training and knowledge-sharing, and raising public awareness about the role of community energy in achieving climate goals. Their priorities include ensuring energy justice, enabling genuine community participation, and creating regulatory distinctions between citizen energy projects and for-profit actors. Desmi’s recent actions include submitting joint positions on Greece’s NECP (National Energy and Climate Plan), participating in the official feedback group for the Greek Social Climate Plan, engaging with key ministries and regulators, and co-hosting public discussions to bring energy democracy into the national debate.
The coalition is structured as a legal association with an inclusive governance model that reflects cooperative values. A key strength lies in its active working groups, diverse membership, and collaborative decision-making process, all of which fuel its momentum and resilience.
A Conversation with Dimitris Kitsikopoulos: Building a Collective Vision for Energy Democracy
Dimitris Kitsikopoulos is president of the Board of Directors of Desmi and a representative of the Common Energy Community, founded in Epirus, northwestern Greece. He spoke to us about the motivations behind creating a national coalition, the challenges they’ve faced, and what lies ahead.
What drives your involvement in the coalition?
“I represent Common Energy Community, an energy community founded in 2021 in Epirus, a region in northwestern Greece. For us, joining the Coalition was a necessity, not an option. From the beginning, we understood that we wouldn't survive if we tried to do it alone. We soon realized that the energy system was not designed with energy communities and their special characteristics in mind. So, we made a clear decision to seek out supportive organizations and like-minded energy communities, joining forces to amplify our collective voice. Beyond this collective drive, I have observed that cooperatives worldwide thrive when they collaborate and organize in regional unions and national and international federations.”
What challenges have you faced in building the coalition?
“The main challenge was defining who is eligible to become a member. We had to make sure that the members are really citizens’ energy communities and not just any group that fits the legal definition. We spent a lot of time discussing eligibility criteria and trying to clarify what kind of communities we wanted to include. At the same time, we were trying to shape our message towards institutional stakeholders, to explain what we do and why we are important, and to make sure that energy communities are recognized as a separate category in policy discussions. Another significant challenge was the legal framework for creating energy community unions and federations, which was not supportive and became even more complex as of 2023.”
What is your long-term vision for the coalition?
“Taking our time to establish the Coalition's goals and activities before formalizing it has proven beneficial. For the immediate future, our main focus will be on advocacy and policymaking. Our aim is to improve the regulatory and legal framework and to develop targeted incentives that create a level playing field for energy communities, encouraging innovative business models. These models should extend beyond collective self-production and energy sharing to include activities like electromobility, demand-side flexibility, housing renovation, energy savings and efficiency, as well as training and capacity-building initiatives. In addition to supporting the Ministry, policymakers and other stakeholders in building an enabling framework for energy communities, we are committed to exchanging knowledge and enhancing our internal capacity.
There is still much to be done in an increasingly challenging environment. At least now, with our coalition in place, we have friends to walk this unfriendly path together...”
With a clear mission and a collaborative structure, Desmi is empowering communities across Greece to claim their role in the energy transition. By combining advocacy, knowledge sharing, and grassroots mobilization, the coalition is transforming the landscape of citizen-led energy from scattered initiatives into a unified movement.
