There is a clear need for unlocking and activating the underlying market potential of community bioenergy and that is exactly what BECoop aims to do.
The ambition of BECoop is to foster a broad deployment of bioenergy heating technologies across Europe, by providing the necessary conditions and technical as well as business support tools for unlocking the underlying market potential of community bioenergy.
The project aims to make community bioenergy projects more appealing to potential interested actors and to foster new links and partnerships among the international bioenergy community.
BECoop employs a market research process with qualitative and quantitative survey methods to offer a clear understanding of the dynamic community bioenergy heating landscape at regional, national and EU level. The project investigates and specifies the community bioenergy market uptake facilitators and barriers and, building upon this information, further empowers policy makers to introduce enabling frameworks for community bioenergy.
BECoop will specifically equip administrative authorities with support schemes (replication guidelines, networking with more advanced regions, self-assessment tools, evidence from real practice) and skills (capacity building) so as to enable them to promote (as policy enablers, project facilitators and beneficiaries) such new forms of energy system governance and allow them to equally compete with other energy market actors.
On top of these, the project will ignite a policy debate at a local and EU level, through workshops and advocacy activities, aiming to streamline the BECoop policy recommendations to the actual support needs of policy makers.
The BECoop process is deployed to 4 complementary cases of RESCoops and authorities across Europe (see pilot cases).
Mobilize citizens around existing or new community bioenergy initiatives
Boost local bioenergy demand by improving its image and social acceptance
Increase feasibility of their endeavours by identifying suitable technical, business and financial solutions, as well as by pooling expertise and partnerships from the wider EU bioenergy ecosystem
The main pillars of the BECoop concept are therefore:
Reducing resistance, boosting demand and start de-risking community bioenergy investments
Developing bioenergy communities
Unlocking replication potential and scaling up at the EU level
Empowering policy to transfer the community energy momentum to bioenergy heating
Making community bioenergy project development easier, further cutting down time and cost efforts