Energimyndigheten ER 2024-20 Energigemenskaper Förutsättningar (2024)

Document: ER 2024:20, Energigemenskaper — Förutsättningar och förslag på främjandeinsats. Energimyndigheten (Swedish Energy Agency). Published September 2024. Report on the government assignment to investigate conditions for forming energy communities and propose promotional measures. 50 pages.

Significance: this is the earliest formal Swedish government assessment of energy communities — it predates and directly seeded much of what the wiki already documents from later sources (Prop. 2025/26:240, the Commission’s 2026 Recommendation C(2026)2850, Energiföretagen’s 2025 position, Power Circle’s 2026 factsheet). Most of its problem-description content (definition gap, virtual-sharing tax disincentive, IKN-förordningen §22c, REC/CEC distinction) is already captured in Energy Communities from those later sources; this ingest focuses on what it adds that isn’t already there.

Five 2024 policy proposals — and their later fate

Energimyndigheten proposed five concrete measures (ch. 5). Tracked against what actually happened by 2026:

1. A statutory definition of energy community (adopting Ei’s earlier 2020 draft, minus §2:4, now superseded by the 2022 IKN change). Not adopted — Prop. 2025/26:240 (in force 2027) introduces energy sharing rules but still no statutory energy community definition, per the wiki’s existing coverage.
2. A reduced network fee (nätavgift) for virtual sharing, proposed via an Ei mandate to “verka proaktivt för att nyttor som energigemenskaper kan ge ska speglas i nättariffen” — a deliberately open mandate, not a specified discount; the report supports the direction by citing Austria’s example as the clearest country precedent: a 57% network-fee reduction for energy shared at local level, 28% at regional level, alongside concrete Austrian DSO obligations (2-week response to grid-access requests, 2-month smart-meter installation on request). Not adopted — the final 2027 law includes no fee discount, and Energiföretagen’s 2025 position (already in the wiki) explicitly argues against exactly this kind of virtual-sharing incentive on cost-allocation-fairness grounds. This is a clean three-source regulatory-history thread: 2024 proposal → 2025 industry pushback → 2026/2027 law that didn’t adopt it.
3. A joint Energimyndigheten+Ei mandate to develop approved “typfall” (template cases) with regulatory-interpretation support for common sharing configurations — status not confirmed in later sources found so far (see data gaps).
4. A targeted funding call (30 MSEK, 10–20 feasibility studies for new energy communities, ~1–1.5 years support each), planned to launch late 2024/early 2025.
5. A coordinated national support and information initiative (~2 MSEK/year for external resources), to run alongside the funding call.

New named example projects

Beyond Tamarinden and Hammarby Sjöstad (already in the wiki via the Power Circle 2026 factsheet), this report documents five more Swedish projects, all early-stage/pilot as of 2024:

• Sätra (Västerås) — new district developed by Västerås stad with Mälardalens universitet, Mälarenergi, Eksjö hus and WSP; produced a business concept called “Närkraft”: a virtual energy network linking producers, storage, and consumers, aimed at raising the area’s self-sufficiency via shared rooftop solar. Central identified barrier: lack of economic incentive for virtual sharing — the same core problem the report addresses nationally, observed directly in this pilot.
• Austerland Energi (Gotland) — energy community on Östergarnslandet, structured as an ekonomisk förening, developing since 2018 with support from Nygarn Utveckling AB. Explicitly frames its work as a local manifestation of the Paris Agreement, drawing on permaculture principles. A solar park under construction (2024), financed via member-purchased andelar (shares), sold first to local residents, then more broadly across Gotland.
• Andreastorpets vänboende (Tanum) — a byggemenskap (building community) planning 45 apartments (parhus) supplied by a local energy system: solar, wood-chip-fired kraftvärme, heat pumps, and local heat/battery storage. Intends to connect to the ordinary grid but aim for net annual export — a resilience-and-community-focused project distinct from the urban-development-focused examples.
• Embassy of Sharing (Hyllie, Malmö) — Sweden’s largest shared-geoenergy system: seven properties (mixed commercial/residential) with individual boreholes connected by pipes, sharing thermal energy according to need. Built around reusing waste heat that would normally be lost when developments are planned independently; deliberate circularity focus across materials, resources, and activities, not just energy.
• CoAction (Lund) — a Lund kommun-led project (part of the Viable Cities systemdemonstrator programme) coordinating 25 actors toward Lund’s 2030 climate-neutrality goal; the energy-sharing component builds an internal DC (direct-current) network linking buildings to share solar and battery output, intended to scale to more buildings and installations over time.

The formation journey — a practical lifecycle framework

Not previously in the wiki: a structured lifecycle model of how a Swedish energy community actually gets formed, developed through a three-workshop “policylabb” process (part of the Viable Cities Klimatkontrakt 2030 programme) with municipalities, housing/property companies, citizen initiatives, network companies, and researchers.

Stage 1 — Initiering/engagerande/mobilisering (initiation/engagement/mobilisation): problem formulation → idea development and concept design → feasibility pre-study → founding an association (the organisational platform — ownership-model choice depends partly on physical vs. virtual sharing) → member recruitment.

Stage 2 — Planering, tillståndshantering och etablering (planning, permitting, establishment) — explicitly not linear, revisited repeatedly: site selection (permit-process ambiguity named as a recurring pain point, especially for solar parks); financing (tax questions repeatedly named as the hardest part — how shared electricity across property lines is taxed was, at the time, still not fully settled in case law); technical pre-engineering; bygglov (building permit, potentially involving Miljöbalken §12:6 and Lantmäteriet); IKN-undantag application if applicable (noted as genuinely uncertain in legal interpretation — Tamarinden’s own precedent was “praxis men förhållandevis svag praxis,” first-instance only, not appealed, so not fully citable as precedent); feasibility study; dialogue with the grid company (flagged as a bottleneck — DSOs report large volumes of connection applications creating long queue times); ownership-structure decisions; construction; site works and metering; final business-model development (including the tax question).

Stage 3 — Drift och underhåll (operation and maintenance): ongoing technical O&M requiring named roles (e.g. elsäkerhetsansvarig), a long-term management perspective established early, and a flagged emerging risk — some communities plan DC (direct-current) internal distribution instead of AC, and “dagens elektriker” (today’s electricians) don’t always have the DC-specific competence required.

Stage 4 — Avveckling och återvinning (decommissioning and recycling): explicitly under-explored at the time — no Swedish energy community had reached this stage yet in 2024, so this section’s content is anticipatory rather than evidence-based: what happens to physical infrastructure, how a member exits, how equipment is recycled.

Richer country comparisons

• Austria: 57%/28% network-fee reductions (local/regional sharing) — see proposal #2 above — plus concrete DSO service-level obligations for supporting energy communities (2-week access-request response, 2-month smart-meter installation, contractual engagement, 15-minute metering data made available the next day).
• Belgium (Brussels-Capital Region): network fee for shared energy tiered by the physical level at which sharing occurs — within one building, under one low-voltage substation, under one transformer station, or across multiple transformer stations — cheaper the more local the sharing. Belgian rationale: if at least 20% of energy is shared, grid reinforcement can be deferred because the network is used more efficiently.
• Italy: energy communities receive an after-the-fact network-fee rebate rather than an upfront reduction.
• Ireland: the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) runs an established “Sustainable Energy Communities” programme since 2006, with three support legs — thematic peer learning/mentorship networks, support for drafting a formal community energy master plan (with technical-expertise input), and targeted funding matched to each community’s actual needs (from efficiency measures to larger renewable-generation projects) — plus separate SEAI grid-planning grants to help communities identify where they’d deliver the most grid benefit. Result cited: Ireland’s ~800 energy communities, with a 41% national energy-use reduction over 20 years attributed partly to this program (a national outcome, not solely attributable to the EC programme, but cited as context in the report).

Sweden’s EC count — a 2019 baseline

The report cites a 2019 academic count (Magnusson & Palm 2019, via a 2024 Uppsala University presentation): ~140 active initiatives at that time — roughly 80 active wind-power cooperatives (plus ~20 since discontinued), ~30 ecovillages (mostly rural, cooperation/social-integration focused), ~10 small district-heating organisations, and ~10 solar-panel arrangements (mostly BRFs investing in shared rooftop installations or members buying shares in a larger array). This gives the wiki’s existing “~200 in 2026” figure (Power Circle) an actual growth reference point it didn’t have before — roughly 60 more over seven years, a slow build-out consistent with the report’s own framing that Sweden ranks low among EU countries on enabling energy communities.

Relevance to wiki

Data gaps

See Energy Communities › Data gaps — the typfall-mandate and funding-call outcome questions are tracked there, not duplicated here.