Ximo Masip is the co-founder of ImpactE, a company that aims to make people’s lives friendlier in their communities by demonstrating energy saving and data strategies for efficient, sustainable and environmentally friendly energy use.
The Valencian entrepreneur tells us about his experience in founding a start-up that puts people at the centre in order to carry out social innovations and thus involve society in the energy transition.
For this young Valencian company, the Energy Communities model is the main focus of its efficient lines of action to reduce costs and energy expenditure. To do this, they call on people who feel responsible for the environment and energy management in their neighbourhood or city and want to get involved to take a leadership role in this area.
How will social innovation apply to your sector?
Ximo Masip (XM): Our mission is twofold. On the one hand, to facilitate the energy transition and, at the same time, to empower and actively involve citizens. The latter is where we need to incorporate social innovation to get the message across to citizens and engage them.
We apply social innovation by helping cities promote innovative models such as energy communities. These are groups of citizens and SMEs that come together to take collective action for climate and energy.
We first help cities from a technical point of view to understand these new models and to decide whether and how they want to promote them. And once the decision is made, the city uses our tools to communicate to citizens the economic and environmental potential of actively participating in the energy transition and all the associated benefits, to generate interest and to encourage them to join the local energy community.
One of the solutions that works best in this area is solar maps, such as those in Castelló, which allow citizens to determine the potential of their building, home, business or industrial site with a single click at home.
Why is social innovation relevant to advance the energy transition?
XM: The energy transition can take several forms. We can replace today’s large, fossil-fuelled power plants with large, renewable power plants. Or everyone can take action at home to reduce the need for energy, reduce energy consumption and self-generate the energy they need. In the first model, investments are usually in the hands of large companies and the citizen is simply a passive entity in the system, paying bills. In contrast, in the second model, the citizen takes a stake in the energy system and benefits from savings on energy bills. Among many other benefits such as a better energetic quality of your home, which means a much better quality of life.
Well, if we want to opt for the second model, social innovation is essential. The energy transition is not only a technical problem, but also a social one, because we must be able to convince citizens to take the necessary energy policy measures to reduce their energy demand and consumption and to generate their own energy for their own properties. Whether residential, commercial or industrial. And this is a major problem given the current distrust in the sector over the last decade.
How do you get people involved?
XM: This is the big question. There are different ways from what we have seen of how people are involved in the energy transition. It can be bottom-up, an Anglicism meaning from the bottom up, whereby a group of citizens apply for the promotion of these initiatives in the city, such as energetic communities. Or, it can be top-downwhich means from above towards the botton, whereby the city itself promotes these models because the citizens join. The more common is the latter, as has occured in València, Castelló, Alpuente… whereas thee first, is sadly not as common. It would be the ideal and has occured, for example, in Catarroja.
The good thing about the top-down model is that the city can impress a group of citizens to motivate the first energy community, for example. This group of citizens manages the energy community, which functions as an association or cooperative, and this top-down model that was started eventually transforms into a bottom-up approach. That is, it is the same citizens who form the energetic community driven by government that can impress most citizens because they join the initiative and it eventually grows. This is exactly what has occured in Valencia with the first energetic communtiy, the Castellar-El Oliveral. To whom we help in their expansion strategy.
ImpactE’s solutions help cities, industrial districts and energy communities promote these initiatives in conjunction with citizenship with digital tools and marketing campaigns to generate interest in the project and attract stakeholders. As tools to know technically what is the best way to expand, for example looking for new covers and other behaviours of efficient energy.
What are the main measures you recommend to companies, people and cities with whom you work?
XM: At ImpactE we work in more than 30 cities nationwide, larger and smaller. From Murla, which has a hundred inhabitants, to Valencia and also in Barcelona, outside the Valencian Community. Our solutions are adapted to the reality of the municipality to provide maximum value.
The main measure we recommend is to sit down and do proper energy planning before taking concrete action. This enables the municipality or group of companies in an industrial area or energy community to achieve greater economic profitability and better use of technical and physical resources (roofs).
In the case of Sumacàrcer City Council, for example, the fact that we had previously proposed a clear strategy for municipal self-consumption has meant that instead of 10 photovoltaic self-consumption systems on 10 public buildings, we can reach all 10 public buildings with a single common self-consumption system. Thanks to this measure, the City Council saves 57% of the investment costs (more than €30,000), the technician only has to carry out one project instead of 10, and the most interesting thing is that thanks to the initiative of the Local Energy Community, there are 9 free roofs left in the municipality that can be used, as this municipality is already doing. Sumacàrcer is an example of a small town, but when we talk about the same approach in a large municipality like Castelló, we are talking about possible savings of more than 1 million euros.
And these actions are also subsidised by the regional and autonomous government. Just these days, the Regional Ministry of Agriculture, Rural Development, Climate Emergency and Ecological Transition’s Directorate for Ecological Transition has published the legal bases for public subsidies that subsidise this type of action, in order to encourage local governments to have an approach and a strategy before embarking on the work, and to make better use of resources.
Social innovation exists in almost every area where society is evolving, because we need people’s participation to move forward as a whole. ImpactE is a good example of how we can take entrepreneurship and social innovation to a level we could not even imagine a few years ago. As individuals, we cannot detach ourselves from the social mass in which we live, but must act to create a world in which synergies and progress emerge from communities and are put at the service of people.
