• The co-op is owned by the community – nobody takes profits
• It now employs 4 people
• It has had very important local sustainability success: retrofiting homesAdd a Tooltip Text, helping poeple install local electricity generation, and much more (see below)
• The co-op structure has helped the group make a firm foundation for its work and supports everyday work as well as long term future plans.
• The co-op example can be copied by other communities and is proven to work.

• This is a bottom-up organisation, community led. It is very successful and shows how community memebrs can achive big things working together.
• Our aim is to make the 3 islands fossil-fuel-free using green energy generated on the islands and owned by the cooperative.
• Our project involves upgrading and retrofitting homes and buildings;
• We introduced electric cars and buses
• We encourage households to install heat pumps, photovoltaic and battery storage; generating electricity locally;
• Being partners on numerous EU funded research projects allows us to employ people here, making the Aran Islands an Energy Research Hub.

• 50% of the houses have had some energy related retrofitting done since 2012.
  Many buildings are now operating fossil-fuel-free.
  There are many electric cars being used on Inis Mor.
  Up to 100 buildings now have heat pumps and photovoltaic panels.
  Involved at present in 4 EU funded projects (H2020 and InterReg).
  Now employing 4 people (not on government schemes).
  Produced an Energy Master Plan
  We Conduct Energy Tours on Inis Mor and are open to visitors

• The Aran Islands are famous for being self-sufficient. In the past, people got all of their food locally from  the land and the sea, the built their houses of local materials, built their own boats, made their own clothes. Their energy source used to be turf brought in from the mainland in return for salted fish. Now it comes in as electricity from a cable.
• The Energy Cooperative developed out of the Comharchumann Forbartha Árann. A sub committee called the ‘Energy Committee’ worked for many years on this project before setting up the energy cooperative.
• The islanders believe in their ability to be self-sufficient again in a sustainable way, see it as a necessity given the reality of climate change, and take pride in working towards those aims.

• SDG 12: Sustainable consumption and production
• SDG 13: Climate Action
• SDG 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities

Keywords: Community-Driven, Municipal, Waste.