IGPN - International Green Purchasing Network

August 19, 2025

Public procurement should support energy communities

Public tenders should create space for community-led initiatives for renewable energy, allowing local actors to develop their own projects and to access the grid on equal footing with professional/market actors. This is one of the key points from the “Fast and Fair Renewables and Grids” agreement, which brings developers, local governments, civil society and industry. Collectively, these sectoral stakeholders have put forward a set of baseline principles to deploy new renewable energy infrastructure in a manner that creates fairer outcomes for all, thereby generating greater community support and easing local energy transitions.
The endorsing stakeholders flag that the risk to biodiversity and ecosystems will decrease by 75%, while climate change-related land loss and degradation will be 50% reduced, if renewables dominate the energy system. Building and operating new Renewable Energy Systems (RES) is less expensive than deploying coal and fossil gas plants in terms of environmental and economic cost in the long term. However, the advancement of RES remains too slow to achieve EU renewables targets to mitigate climate change, due to lengthy permitting times and lack of political support. At the local level, municipalities wanting to implement RES frequently encounter challenges such as local opposition, a lack of perceived local value and competing interests and motivations.
The Fast and Fair Renewables and Grids initiative aims to speed up the rollout of renewables at the local level and has established five baseline principles for how the development of new RES should be approached, focusing on local influence, local value, transparency, nature-positive impacts, and community empowerment.
Public procurement can be an important instrument in particular for community empowerment, as it can help establish a level playing field for all actors in the renewable energy market by creating “space in tenders, auctions and public procurement to allocate room for and/or remunerate projects developed by renewable energy communities.” In addition, tenderers could reduce administrative requirements, include community-focused bidding criteria, reserve space in tender procedures for opening new grid capacity and create tailored bidding windows, and exemptions for renewable energy communities.
The full set of principles can be found here.
More details at ICLEI sustainable procurement platform webpage.

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