Presentation short abstract

This presentation explores the rise of Spain’s energy communities, focusing on their spatial patterns, enabling factors, and challenges in promoting local empowerment against dominant corporate-led transitions

Presentation long abstract

Amid intensifying energy and climate crises, dominant policy responses in Spain and across Europe continue to privilege corporate-led, large-scale renewable energy projects, reproducing extractive logics and territorial inequalities. In contrast, a rapidly expanding energy-community movement advocates for energy as a fundamental right and fosters new subjectivities grounded in care, solidarity, and local empowerment. Yet little is known about where these initiatives emerge, how they spread, and which territorial factors shape their evolution. In particular, it remains unclear whether these initiatives unfold predominantly in rural or urban settings and how local histories, the resistance to large-scale energy projects, and other place-based features condition their proliferation.

Spain’s recent boom in energy communities offers a window into these counter-geographies of transition. Using a mixed-methods approach that combines nationwide mapping, a review of grey literature, a participatory workshop, and semi-structured interviews with key actors I analyze the spatial patterns, territorial drivers and relational networks through which energy communities spread in Spain. Additionally, I illustrate how corporations appropriate the narrative of community empowerment, implementing fake energy communities, where citizens subscribe to a shared photovoltaic self-consumption without participating in any meaningful decision-making, while energy companies retain control and capture public funds. The study shows that the emerging community energy networks fight against these practices, advancing a new culture of energy that truly puts communities at the center of the transition.