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Looking back at 12 years of being president of REScoop.eu
Article written by Dirk Vansintjan, president of REScoop.eu from 2013 to May 2025.
On 22 May 2025, the Annual General Meeting of REScoop.eu in Krakow, Poland, chose a new board for 2025-2029. As I personally reached the maximum of three terms of four years, I could no longer be its president as permanent representative of my energy community Ecopower from Belgium. Time to look back on the past 12 years…
2008-2012-2013-2015
REScoop.eu traces its roots back to 2008 when the first cross-border collaborations of ‘Renewable Energy Sources COOPeratives’ took place. This led to the drafting, submission and approval in 2012 of an EU funded Horizon 2020 project called… REScoop 20-20-20! The project, involving 12 organisations from seven countries, brought to light who we are, what we share and what we successfully do across Europe.
As an informal result, the federation and its first board were constituted in August 2013. The REScoop.eu Statutes and Charter put the ICA principles and values and the definition of a cooperative at the core of the European federation. With our board member Enercoop we managed to organise the biggest side event of the COP 21 Climate conference in Paris. Back then, we were 1.5 people in the REScoop.eu team and our logo was a design I did in Paint.
Clean Energy for All Europeans Package (CEP) 2016-2021
The REScoop 20-20-20 project gave us visibility in the Brussels EU environment and when the European Commission started preparing the revision of a whole set of energy related directives, we engaged actively with the Commission, the Parliament and Member State representatives. We advocated together with the Community Power Coalition for a definition and a ‘bike lane’ for our members, since we are a different player in the energy sector. We suggested not to use the word ‘energy cooperative’ because of the negative connotation with communism in the former communist countries. In a watershed moment for the community energy movement in Europe, we even got two definitions: renewable energy community (in the Renewable Energy Directive) and citizen energy community (in the Electricity Market Directive). This led us to change our baseline to ‘the European federation of energy communities’ later on. We are still following up upon the transposition and implementation of the provisions for energy communities in the Member States.
In 2021 our collaboration with clothes retailer Patagonia results in a great film: ‘We the Power’ spotlighting the growing community energy movement across Europe and the stories of pioneers from all over Europe, including Ecopower and some of our members. I have watched this movie more than 20 times!
REScoop.eu and its team grows, we are 13 people at the end of 2021, and apart from European Union or foundation funded projects we start working on service contracts.
2022-2025
In my third and last term as president, we launched the Energy Community Platform, a website that brings community energy resources and tools together in one single place. We also started organising our annual Forum and launched a campaign for the Europeans elections in 2024, as we did in 2014 and 2019. Before the elections, I was invited by the Belgian Energy Minister, Tinne Van der Straeten, to talk during the EU Energy Ministers’ lunch meeting about the needs of our sector.
During this period, we also advocated for the inclusion of energy communities in new EU directives, building upon the provisions of the Clean Energy Package. This resulted in key wins that reinforce the community energy model and empower citizens to take ownership of the energy transition. Today we are 20 people in the REScoop.eu team and represent 2,500 energy communities from across Europe and their 2 million citizens.
Over the past 12 years the watermill of Rotselaar, where I live and where it all started in 1991 for my cooperative Ecopower and by extension REScoop.eu, has become kind of an iconic place. In the coming months, a heat network on aquathermal energy from the river Dijle will be installed there as part of the Interreg NWE AquaCOM project, in which I will keep working for the next two years. Looks like the circle is round then? Or is it a spiral?
