Why green isn't enough to define the transition

Across the Mediterranean, a quiet revolution was promised. Renewable Energy Communities (RECs), where citizens produce, share, and sell their own solar or wind power, were hailed as the cornerstone of a "just transition." The idea is simple: the sun shines for everyone, so why should only corporations profit?

But after extensive fieldwork across Greece, Italy, and Turkey, our research reveals a different story. Renewable Energy Communities cannot be studied in their own right. They are not neutral technologies or legal templates. Instead, they function as vessels, institutional placeholders that absorb and express the pre-existing politics of their territories.

In other words: green energy takes the politics of the place and territory it enters.

Three Countries, Three Political Ecologies

Greece has the most advanced energy community laws in Europe. Law 4513/2018 established Citizen Energy Communities with legal recognition, priority licensing, and virtual net-metering rights. The Minoan Energy Community (MEC) in Crete, headquartered in the town of Arkalochori, where we held our participatory documentary filmmaking workshop is the largest energy cooperative in Greece. Founded in 2019, it unites over 1,600 members including citizens, local businesses, municipalities, and even churches, working to drive regional energy democracy and combat energy poverty.

Yet MEC cannot implement a single commercial project. No new wind licenses have been issued in Crete since 2003. In 2024, the government abolished net-metering, the only economically viable model for energy communities, claiming it causes "market distortion," despite accounting for only 8% of installed PV capacity.

Across Crete, locals call their region "the dumping ground of Crete", hosting wind turbines and solar farms while lacking paved roads and a hospital.

One resident of Chandras village, next to the abandoned medieval village of Voila described how land in nearby Sitanos was purchased under claims of "snail farming," only to be sold later to a company for a photovoltaic park. Residents discovered the truth only when construction trucks arrived. "The residents were crying and could not realise what was happening," he said.

Another resident of Adraktos, who successfully prevented three wind turbines from being installed less than 200 metres from the last house in his village, captured the fear of displacement: "We will become employees."

As one field participant observed, summarising a sentiment heard across the island: "A democratic deficit could be considered one of the outcomes of this research."

 

 

The Italian case is analytically the richest because it destroys the idea of a single "Italian model." Instead, Italy functions as a miniature laboratory of political ecology, where radically different energy community forms have emerged from the same national legal framework (RED II transposed via Legislative Decree 199/2021). The law is hence not destiny, but territory is.

Veneto (North): The Corporate Model

In Veneto, the REC is a business-led institution. ArtCom-Cert was created not by citizens or municipalities but by associations of entrepreneurs, artisans, industrialists, and merchants. "Our energy community was born to respond to the needs of energy-intensive enterprises." The language is not "participation" or "solidarity" but "enterprise" and "foundation." This reflects a region of small family firms where individualism is high and collective action is understood through the logic of the consortium, not the commune.

Emilia-Romagna (Centre): The Cooperative Model

Emilia-Romagna represents the most advanced regional model, leveraging a deep-rooted cooperative tradition. It was the first region to write a regional law for RECs (2022), and more than 80 RECs have been born with regional funding. As one regional official explains: "There is a long tradition of cooperatives here. The cooperative way to take decisions and to manage the territory. We always have left-wing government here."

Castel Maggiore REC emerged from a local Legambiente branch active against a polluting landfill. The REC was explicitly conceived to replace that landfill, transforming a "territorial wound" into a collective resource through photovoltaic energy production. It reactivates participatory political processes rooted in Bologna's historical neighbourhood-level political culture.

Valsamoggia REC, led by retired professionals with technical expertise, relied on door-to-door engagement with residents and small businesses, combining renewable energy with mutualistic social goals including support for vulnerable families. As the regional official notes: "The most important effect is cultural change. People become consumers-producers. It builds a sense of community again against the increasing individualisation of society."

Milan (CERcaMI): The University-Led Solidarity Model

CERcaMI (Comunità Energetica Rinnovabile Milano) offers a fourth Italian variant, a university-led, urban solidarity model. Created through collaboration between Politecnico di Milano, the Municipality of Milan, and third-sector organisations, it defines itself as a "solidarity REC": approximately 80% of economic benefits are redistributed to social projects and collective local initiatives, selected through participatory processes.

However, the absence of direct savings on electricity bills makes citizen engagement difficult, highlighting tensions between solidarity-oriented models and expectations of individual economic return. As one researcher noted: membership is motivated less by personal financial gain than by social and environmental commitment which limits scale.

Naples East (South): The Survival-Struggle Model

Naples East represents a fundamentally different political ecology. Here, the question is not "how do we build an REC?" but "can we build an REC at all in a place broken by the state and the Camorra?"

The anti-mafia network Libera (2,000+ organisations) warns: "There is a lot of money in projects of this kind – for example €2.3 million. That is why the mafia can be involved. Mafia organisations operate like multinationals." Following judge Giovanni Falcone's principle – "the mafia follows the money", Libera points to precedents: after the 1980 Irpinia earthquake, the mafia profited from reconstruction; in Sicily, they moved into wind energy.

The Famiglia Maria REC in San Giovanni a Teduccio is a grassroots initiative in an area of high unemployment and Camorra presence. Its participants are vulnerable, women particularly active, men sometimes "growing up fasting, or working." The economic reality is stark: "Using an energy community, you might earn €55-70 in two months."

Maestri di Strada (Masters of the Street) uses renewable energy kits to keep youth away from illegal work. As one educator stated: "80,000 people die every year because of pollution. The real revolution is to go beyond the Earth and obtain energy directly from it. The sun is there for everyone, every day. No one can say, 'This sun is mine, you must pay to use it.' But this is the opposite of what those who control the world's energy want."

 

 

 In Turkey's densely populated urban centres, Nilüfer (Bursa) and Kadıköy (Istanbul), the path to establishing Renewable Energy Communities has proven exceptionally challenging, despite strong local commitment.

A 2019 regulation requires that all cooperative members share the same grid connection point and the same meter (tüketim birleştirme), a provision that is nearly impossible to satisfy in sprawling metropolitan areas where residents are distributed across different neighbourhoods and substations. A company with multiple branches in different cities can aggregate consumption. A group of citizens cannot.

Nilüfer Municipality has installed 1.45 MW of solar, covering approximately 25% of its municipal consumption, and runs a Sustainability Park where children generate electricity by cycling.

Its energy cooperative, established in 2016 with 327 members, holds annual general assemblies, but cannot operate, kept alive on paper, awaiting regulatory clarity.

Kadıköy Municipality has installed solar on public buildings, participated in EU Horizon projects, and developed detailed plans for a Positive Energy District, cancelled when a state metro project took priority. They were the first municipality to ban plastic bags, as well. The ministry then wrote asking: 'On what authority did you do this?' Then it has created its own environmental agency to run the same project.

Some cooperatives in Turkey collected millions of liras from thousands of citizens with promises of solar partnerships that never materialised. This has poisoned trust for a generation. As one civil society leader based in Ankara notes: "Cooperatives already have a bad image in Turkey due to past housing cooperatives that failed or defrauded members. Breaking this is not easy, years of bad experiences, lack of transparency, no developed cooperative management methodology."

Yet one remarkable exception proves that cooperative energy models can work in Turkey under the right conditions. The Kayseri Furniture Manufacturers Cooperative (S.S. Mobilyacılar Yenilenebilir Enerji Üretim Kooperatifi) brings together over 740 SMEs within a single industrial zone, Mobilyakent.

Its vast, unobstructed rooftops, 36,000 square metres host 18,000 solar panels, generating 7.5 GWh annually and delivering electricity to participating businesses at 30% below market rates. Crucially, the entire industrial zone shares a centralised grid connection, naturally fulfilling the regulatory requirement that urban cooperatives struggle to meet. The initial $7.2 million investment was funded through corporate credit channels, a very different financial model from citizen micro-donations.

Kayseri's success demonstrates that Turkey's regulatory framework can accommodate energy communities, but primarily those that are industrial, capital-rich, and spatially concentrated.

The question for the future is whether the legal space can be widened to include the citizen-led, residential, urban initiatives that remain, for now, waiting in the wings. In countries where state institutions are weak, people can just buy cheap Chinese solar panels and go off-grid. This is not the case in Turkey.

 

 

The core argument: Energy as diagnostic, not just energy

The significance of Renewable Energy Communities is not primarily energetic or economic. It is diagnostic. They function as a political X-ray, revealing the deep structures of trust, state-society relations, cooperative capacity, and histories of violence (environmental, criminal, authoritarian) that shape what kind of transition is possible on the ground.

Studying green energy "in its own right" essentially echoes the celebratory language that this research aims to challenge. Therefore, the green energy transition may not be inherently green but often becomes a vehicle of something else and beyond.