Energy communities organise collective and citizen-driven energy actions that help pave the way for a clean energy transition, whilst moving citizens to the fore. They contribute to increase public acceptance of renewable energy projects and make it easier to attract private investments in the clean energy transition. At the same time, they have the potential to provide direct benefits to citizens by advancing energy efficiency and lowering their electricity bills.
By supporting citizen participation, energy communities can moreover help in providing flexibility to the electricity system through demand-response and storage. 
The overall objective of the LECSEA-project was a successful take-off of Energy Communities (EC's) in the 2-Seas area. It aimed to get new LEC-options in legislation adopted by the stakeholders, the market and energy consumers to create energy synergies and cooperation models. This has led to unlocking extra potential of mid-scale sustainable energy (large solar PV, CHP, district heating, microgrids, storage, wind...) shared in the EC's. 
The LECSEA project objectives targeted at the carbon reduction via more sustainable energy production, knowledge building with 640 potential EC-stakeholders and decision makers reached with the knowledge platform. 

The project main outputs are:
● A service Centre on Energy Communities in the 2-Seas area. A library of tested and tailor-made tools, services, and methodologies to enable EC facilitators and different target groups (businesses, social housing, citizens, clusters of public and/or private organisations).
● A knowledge platform on EC's in the 2 Seas area that enabled participation and knowledge sharing amongst EC stakeholders and potential end users. The platforms were organised on regional, national and cross-border levels.
● 7 Energy Communities lighthouse demonstrators, making use of the new legal options of creating ECs.
● 2 Infrastructures for EC's: electricity sharing. Investments in the technical innovations/solutions needed to realise a smart-grid alike energy sharing infrastructure.
● 3 Infrastructures for EC's: heat/cold sharing. Investments in the technical innovations/solutions needed to realise 4th generation district heating & cooling schemes.

Check the “Outputs” section below to download related material and see “Main Achievements” section for further information about the achieved results.

Cross border cooperation increased the options per country to operationalise ECs via the creation of a shared service centre and knowledge platform in which the EC-stakeholders of the 4 countries could find tools, services & methods to catalyse their projects and exchange knowledge. Cross border cooperation also allowed the establishment of EC lighthouses throughout the 2 Seas area with complementary focuses (business parks, social housing, market housing, electricity vs heating technology) as well as the exchange of available knowledge on solutions between partners.

Thanks to the cross-border cooperation, the partners became much more alert to the differences in the transposition of the directive by different Member States. The partnership shared many insights in the different approaches, the technical, organisational, and legal options. 

This contributed to gaining a deeper understanding of what an LEC is through the acknowledgement of the different perspectives of the DSO's, energy suppliers, third parties, potential participants in energy communities and more. It became an incentive to look for workable solutions with added value. The variety of projects and contexts (social housing, business parks, new developments, retrofitted buildings) helped identify their key features. 

The cross-border cooperation has highlighted the difficulty of achieving the objective of planning territories on a cross-border scale. Indeed, although necessary for the progress of the European territories, the deployment of a common project on a set of different States proves to be very ambitious, because of the divergence of the legal regulations, the planning practices, the cultures of local planning and the languages between the territories. Following this logic, the LECSEA project allowed to realise that the development of local energy communities (LECs) remains strongly limited as long as no harmonisation of national planning approaches exists at the European level, and as long as different planning cultures continue to shape the conception of territorial planning.