Electricity, my neighbours and me

A local citizen power plant?

First neighbour meeting

On Monday 29th June, 40 neighbours, owners, tenants, just curious or already experts met at the Tri Postal to imagine together how by tomorrow we could produce and own a maximum of cheaper, local, green energy, in the neighbourhood of Saint-Gilles - Midi.

From production to installation and investment, multiple questions were addressed, whether they were practicalities or more fundamental questions about our motivations and the sense of our project. We had the opportunity to learn a lot, about technical issues, but above all, from each other.

Two neighbours, Christophe and Mohammed, shared their experience and their journey towards the installation of photovoltaic panels. They shared with us their motivations, satisfactions, the obstacles they encountered, the fun and not so fun anecdotes, and advice for those who would like to do the same. They also shared with us their hopes to be able to share their surplus energy with others in the future and to inspire as many neighbours as possible to do the same, to form a real "energy community".

We all quickly realized that green and local energy is interesting for many reasons (environmental, economic, social), but it's not always easy to get started or to find your way around when you're alone. So we put our creativity to the test to imagine how we could make this process something more collective and less tedious.

We realised that together we could pool our knowledge to help each other and answer common questions, but also pool production and investment, for example by organising group purchases or negotiating collectively with suppliers and third party investors.

So from September, we will meet again to talk about what we can put in place already to act collectively, and discuss what to do next...

PS: In the meantime we're also still looking for names for our group! Centrale Électrique Midi / Relectripublique / PV Partagé / Republic du Compteur / Free-Lectricity / Democratic Electricity / The Smiling Electric Union / Club Midi Solar ... [= the names proposed so far] ... Do you like them? Any other ideas? Send them to us! :-)

Electricity, my neighbours and me