Getafe Potencia, an energy community centered around energy poverty and housing renovation

Getafe is a metropolitan municipality in southern Madrid with a strong commitment to social inclusion, citizen participation, and the right to energy as a fundamental component of the right to housing. In recent years, it has advanced its local energy transition through municipal planning, support structures, and practical initiatives linking climate action with energy justice. 

This approach builds on a strong background of public innovation, particularly the EPIU Hogares Saludables project (2019–2023), an Urban Innovative Actions (UIA) initiative aimed at identifying and addressing hidden energy poverty. The project laid the foundations for a comprehensive one-stop-shop service, “Hogares Saludables,” which has already supported over 4,000 households and is now integrated into the municipal strategy Getafe Rehabilita, promoting healthy homes, buildings, and neighbourhoods within a broader citizen support pathway on energy supply, renovation, and energy communities. 

At the same time, the city faces major socio-economic and energy challenges: ageing housing stock, widespread energy vulnerability and poverty, and neighbourhoods combining low incomes, older and migrant tenant populations, and poor energy performance. 

From a municipal OSS to a frontline energy community

In this context, the Getafe Potencia Energy Community was created as a local renewable energy initiative to deliver environmental, social and local economic benefits rather than profit, building on the municipal Community Transformation Office (OTC), operated by EMSV Getafe within the local one-stop shop (OSS), which helped mobilise citizens and enable its creation. 

Formally registered in December 2024, it reflects a hybrid approach to citizen energy and promotes collective renewable energy, self-consumption, efficiency, flexibility, sustainable mobility, training and awareness, while addressing energy poverty and unequal access to energy.

The community is an association based on open, voluntary and democratic participation, with one member–one vote, and currently brings together 36 members, mostly citizens alongside a small cooperative/SME, neighbourhood associations and EMSV Getafe. 

Its governance model is strongly inclusive: households are recognised as the participation unit, vulnerable households can join as full voting members, and part of the shared energy is reserved for energy-poor households. Gender equality and inclusion are central, with an all-women founding board, gender-neutral language in official documents, and active outreach to women, young people and vulnerable groups.

Participation is further supported through a Welcome Committee, and household members can engage even if only one person holds voting rights. Its first initiative consists of community-managed shared self-consumption from a public solar installation, already in place and pending DSO approval, with 30% of the energy reserved for vulnerable families.

The next phase focuses on scaling, piloting and integration. Getafe Potencia plans to connect PV deployment, collective self-consumption and energy sharing through a “generate–share–reinvest–renovate” model, reinvesting benefits into further renewable projects and citizen-led building renovation, particularly for vulnerable households. The initiative will expand into building rehabilitation in priority neighbourhoods such as Las Margaritas, Juan de la Cierva and Fátima-Alhóndiga, while strengthening local support structures and partnerships. 

It also foresees an innovative pilot on aggregation, energy sharing and flexibility services in areas with high rooftop PV uptake and ageing populations, including Sector III, Getafe Norte and El Bercial. This scaling process is designed to be co-created with residents and local actors, ensuring that the model remains inclusive, democratic and transferable to other municipalities in Spain and across Europe.

What the Municipality is doing

Getafe is not acting only as a passive facilitator. The municipality, mainly through EMSV Getafe and its Energy Communities Department within the One Stop Shop / Community Transformation Office (EC-OSS / OTC), is playing a mixed role: it enables, actively supports, and in some areas is directly involved in implementation. 

The municipal structure provides technical, legal, administrative, financial and social support; mobilises neighbourhood associations, homeowners’ associations, vulnerable households and municipal departments; and helps turn community interest into viable projects. The municipality is also directly connected to the energy community through EMSV’s membership and through the fact that treasury and financial management functions are supported by the public agency.

Concretely, municipal support has included awareness-raising, training, accompaniment in governance design, help with legal set-up, support for subsidy applications, links with social services, and the use of public rooftops and public buildings as enabling assets. This support has been crucial in unlocking projects that would have been difficult for a young citizen-led group to deliver alone, especially in a dense urban setting with fragmented ownership, administrative complexity and relatively low participation. The municipal enabling role has also helped bridge the gap between policy ambition and real community uptake, which remains one of the main barriers in Getafe.

Municipal involvement has also made possible a more social use of community energy. Public photovoltaic installations are being placed at the disposal of the energy community so that benefits reach vulnerable households directly rather than being captured as private profit. At least 30% of participating households in the public-led model are intended to be vulnerable households participating as full members in governance, not as passive beneficiaries. 

In parallel, the municipality is helping the community move towards a more durable financial model in which future revenues from private photovoltaic installations, PPAs, and the creation of a solidary revolving fund. That fund is intended to support building-level and household-level renovation in vulnerable neighbourhoods, linking renewable deployment to energy poverty alleviation and thermal comfort improvements.

Outcomes

As the community is still emerging, the most concrete measurable outcomes currently available relate to the planned scaling model rather than to a long record of operational results. The clearest quantified impacts identified for the next phase are 838,500 kWh/year of renewable energy production, 187,500 kWh/year of energy savings, and an estimated 237 tonnes of CO2 emissions avoided per year. The implementation pathway also foresees 159 kWp of municipal PV, up to 400 kWp of private PV, 200 kWh of storage, and the start of renovations financed partly through the revolving fund.

Beyond energy, the initiative has already generated important social and institutional outcomes. It has created the first residential energy community in Getafe, helped reactivate neighbourhood associations around energy issues, and demonstrated a governance model explicitly centred on inclusion, energy poverty and gender equality. 

The all-women board, the recognition of the household as the participating unit, the welcome committee for vulnerable and underrepresented groups, and the reservation of an energy quota for vulnerable members all show that the project is producing social innovation, not only technical deployment.

In addition, the broader local ecosystem includes the industrial energy community Getafe Genera (with the impulse of Getafe Iniciativas, another public company), the Power2People Getafe concept for aggregation and flexibility, and European cooperation work on transferring the EC-OSS model to other territories. In this sense, Getafe Potencia is functioning as a first demonstrator within a wider municipal strategy.

Lessons learnt

A first key lesson is that strong public enabling matters, especially in dense urban contexts. Getafe’s experience suggests that energy communities do not automatically emerge just because solar potential exists. They need trusted intermediaries, technical accompaniment, simplified information, and stable institutional backing. The EC-OSS has been one of the main levers of success because it reduces mistrust, lowers transaction costs and helps residents navigate governance, finance and bureaucracy.

A second lesson is that inclusion has to be designed deliberately. The most promising elements in Getafe are not only technical but organisational: recognising households rather than only bill holders, giving vulnerable households full membership and voting rights, using neighbourhood associations as trusted intermediaries, and building participation processes that include women, older residents, non-digital groups and other underrepresented actors.

The main mistake or limitation identified so far is that institutional progress does not automatically translate into broad social uptake. Even with strong municipal support, participation remains relatively limited, especially in multi-apartment buildings where decision-making is slow and trust takes time to build. Another lesson is that relying only on grants or on simple PV shared self-consumption is not enough; long-term success requires more robust business models, blended finance and revenue recycling into wider social goals such as renovation and energy poverty reduction.

Next Steps

The next stage combines scaling, piloting and institutional consolidation. Politically and socially, the main local challenge is to build legitimacy and participation in a context where collective action remains difficult. At national and regional level, the biggest barriers are regulatory fragmentation, bureaucratic complexity, uncertainty around energy community frameworks, and the lack of stable pathways for citizen-led renovation. 

Financially, there are challenges around liquidity, delayed subsidies, banks’ reluctance, and the need for blended finance. Technologically and organisationally, there are still gaps in aggregation tools, storage, flexibility management, contractor availability and HOA coordination.

Getafe’s way of overcoming these barriers is to combine municipal assets, public enabling and community-controlled finance. The roadmap includes commissioning the Las Margaritas civic centre installation, extending PV to schools and private rooftops, developing standardised HOA toolkits, launching crowdfunding and crowd-lending, and starting revolving-fund disbursements for priority renovations in vulnerable districts such as Las Margaritas, Juan de la Cierva, San Isidro and La Alhóndiga. The municipality also wants to strengthen citizen deliberation through a Citizen Energy Panel and a future Citizen Energy Board so that scaling remains socially grounded and accountable.

What the municipality needs now is continued technical assistance, stable policy support, access to flexible finance, institutional coordination across departments, and enough time and resources to professionalise facilitation while preserving democratic control.

Replication Potential

The project has strong replication potential because it addresses barriers common to many metropolitan municipalities: ageing building stock, energy poverty, fragmented ownership, low trust, weak participation, and limited municipal capacity. What other Spanish cities can learn is that community energy becomes much more viable when it is supported by a permanent municipal enabling structure, uses public assets strategically, and links renewable generation to social priorities such as renovation and energy poverty.

Beyond Spain, the main takeaway is the model itself: generate, share, reinvest, renovate. Instead of treating citizen energy as a narrow solar project, Getafe is turning it into a broader urban transition tool that combines local renewable production, democratic governance, vulnerable-household inclusion, financial innovation and neighbourhood renovation. That makes it especially relevant for other European cities facing similar urban barriers and looking for ways to make citizen energy socially credible, institutionally workable and scalable.

Getafe, Spain

Energy Community in Focus

Getafe Potencia

Active since: 2024

Stage of implementation: Established Energy Community

Key Energy Figures

• Total capacity installed: 40 kWp (installed, but pending approval from the DSO)

Type of support from the Municipality

• Facilitation: setting targets, one stop shop, workshops, permits, access to meeting rooms…
• Support: access to public roofs/land, administrative support, municipal guarantees, buying energy from the community.
• Direct Involvement: Land and Housing Municipal Company (EMSV) is a member.

Covenant Figures

• Signatory to the Covenant of Mayors since: 2021
• Emission reduction ambitions: 
  • - 40 % GHG emissions reductions by 2030
•  Urbact Good Practice

Related links 

• Comprehensive strategy for the rehabilitation and regeneration of the built environment in Getafe (in ES)
• Public Housing Data Portal