Balbriggan, an area in County Dublin which is within the administrative areas of Fingal County Council, is one of the seven pilot sites of the E2-CUTIES. The LEC initiative is working on a Decarbonising Zone (DZ), a framework to cut emissions by 51% by 2030 and achieve net zero by 2050. This setting provides a unique opportunity to co-create climate solutions, reduce local energy demand, and encourage participation from residents, businesses, and community groups.
At the heart of the LEC is the Balbriggan Sustainable Energy Community (SEC), founded in 2021, which prepared an Energy Master Plan for the town of Balbriggan and has now begun implementing energy projects. They are cooperating with Fingal County Council to support the Decarbonising Zone. Codema, Dublin’s Energy Agency, is providing support and expertise to the SEC.
Together, they aim to promote community-led energy efficiency, develop renewable projects such as solar PV and a community-owned solar farm, explore local energy sharing, and integrate nature-based solutions.
Balbriggan today: a growing community
Balbriggan is the youngest and most ethnically diverse large town in Ireland, located about 35 km north of Dublin City. The population of Balbriggan was 24,322 according to the 2022 Census, with a high percentage being under 35 years old. Residents are middle-income households, but there are also vulnerable households that face energy poverty and high living costs, which can make investing in home energy upgrades difficult. 50% of the heating systems are individual gas boilers, but options to equip roofs with solar panels or geothermal energy systems are explored.
The Dublin–Balbriggan LEC: building the foundations for strong collaboration In Ireland, a Local Energy Community (LEC) is referred to as a Sustainable Energy Community (SEC). The SEC in Balbriggan is in its early stages, operating as a very small, volunteer-run group with only three core members and has been legally registered as a Company Limited by Guarantee since 2021. Fingal County Council (FCC) has recently made the partnership between the SEC and the local authority more formal through the Our Balbriggan Sustainability, Climate Action & Biodiversity committee.
As a young and small organisation, the SEC is still developing. It focuses mainly on practical projects like solar energy , energy-sharing schemes, and home retrofits. FCC supports this work by concentrating more on system-level needs such as data access, monitoring tools, and technical expertise. Together, they aim to build a strong governance framework to make their partnership clearer and to define their roles and responsibilities.
A wish list to move their collaboration to the next level
This wish-list is composed of three main items that combine their various challenges.
Wish n°1: Improve capacity and funding
The SEC struggles with not having enough people or money to work at the scale they would like. The SEC has too few members to take on bigger projects and relies mostly on volunteers, which makes it hard to keep things moving. They need full-time staff and a more stable way to fund their work. At the moment, they depend on one-off grants and do not yet have a steady income or a strong business model to support long-term plans.
Fingal County Council also needs more reliable funding and better investment structures to move from planning into actual large-scale delivery. Without stable resources and predictable financial support, FCC cannot fully carry out or expand its community energy projects.
Wish n°2: Having supportive policies and clear, helpful rules
Within the current system, there is a need for more clarity when it comes to laws and regulations surrounding the Decarbonising Zones and other climate initiatives like energy communities. For the SEC, there is no official legal status for energy cooperatives, which makes it hard for them to be fully recognised at the national level. FCC also faces uncertainty because the rules about what local authorities can and cannot do in community energy are not clearly defined. On top of this, FCC has to deal with a complicated system where responsibilities are spread across many institutions, policy changes happen slowly, and Ireland’s centralised energy system creates challenges for local action.
Gaining more support from elected councillors would help the SEC to influence policy. For FCC, the challenge is more about trying to connect national priorities, regional duties, and local goals into one clear and workable plan.
Wish n°3: Being trusted and ensuring inclusive participation
Another challenge is building trust between organisations and local communities . Some residents, especially people from underrepresented or marginalised groups, may feel left out of decision-making. This makes local energy projects less inclusive and can make it harder for certain groups to take part.
Both the SEC and FCC stress the importance of building trust and making participation open to everyone. This means tackling language barriers, involving people who struggle with energy costs, reaching out to groups who are often overlooked, and avoiding engagement fatigue. For the SEC, the key is to strengthen trust among volunteers and keep grassroots support active. For FCC, the challenge is to involve a wide range of community members, including those who have not been heard in the past, and to make sure everyone’s views are included in the shared goals for community energy.
The Balbriggan LEC is still at the beginning of its journey, but it has strong potential to become a leading example of community-led climate action in Ireland. By strengthening capacity, improving the policy environment, and ensuring that all residents can take part, the Balbriggan LEC can move from small pilot actions to meaningful projects that benefit everyone.
To support the transition in Balbriggan, the LEC can count on its European peers and be inspired by the other pilot sites of the E2-CUTIES project: Utrecht, Leuven and Strasbourg.