Grebo (SE)

Showing a grounded picture of what it takes to move from curiosity to collective action.

The Grebo Energy Community initiative is a non-profit effort exploring collaboration between the municipality and private actors in the village of Grebo, located between Linköping and Åtvidaberg’s urban area in Sweden. Potential founding members include the local, municipality-owned school, the grocery store, the church and representatives of the village association. The initiative emerged when the original plan in Facetten became difficult to realize, prompting Åtvidaberg Municipality to look for other options in the area.

The operational model & energy flow

The model draws on existing solar panels already installed on the rooftops of the school, the local store and some private households, together with potential new panels on a planned new school building. Because members consume electricity at different times of day, the plan is for electricity to be used directly by members rather than pooled centrally. In the first stage, sharing would happen via physical cables between nearby buildings. A second stage, bringing in more private households, would require virtual sharing instead. A joint battery, or several smaller batteries, is also being considered, both to strengthen local energy resilience and to help cut power peaks.

Numbers at a glance

Grebo remains at the exploratory stage, without a finalized technical or financial model.

The journey of the Grebo Pilot Site

Grebo was not chosen because of one dramatic energy problem waiting to be solved. It stood out because it offered several things that matter when an energy community is still just an idea: an expansive phase with around 200 new residential plots planned in the coming years, a set of nearby local actors with varied energy needs, and – most importantly – strong existing cohesion and high local engagement.

Early discussions, led by a working group bringing together the County Administrative Board, Uppsala University and Åtvidaberg Municipality, focused on places that already matter in village life. Representatives of the church, the grocery store and the village association were invited to in-person meetings, and the initial response was positive – renewable energy itself was not new to them, but the idea of sharing it was.

Getting the first group around the table was not the hard part. Maintaining momentum between meetings proved harder, with slower responses and more difficulty sustaining communication – a pattern the project team partly attributes to the process being initiated from the top down rather than growing organically from within the community. The main barriers turned out to be organizational rather than technical: who would take ownership of the next step, and legal questions such as taxation on electricity sharing.

A foundation for what comes next

Grebo’s value doesn’t depend on a finished technical model – it lies in the groundwork the process has already built. It increased local knowledge, brought the right actors into the same conversation, and gave the municipality a real basis for future decisions. It has also opened up discussion about whether energy community thinking could be woven into Grebo’s expansion plans going forward.

What Grebo offers other villages isn’t a copy-paste model – it’s a clear-eyed picture of what it actually takes to turn genuine local interest into collective action: a shared goal, and a committed core group ready to keep carrying the process forward after the first meeting ends.

Programme Manual Online

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