Abundantly exposed to the wind and sun, Europe’s islands long neglected their clean natural resources and depended on costly fossil fuels. From the Canaries to Crete, today many are flipping the script — building citizen-led, renewable energy systems. As they test new models and technologies, could these “living labs” point the way for Europe’s mainland?
It began with a national competition in 1997. Denmark, shaken by the 1970s oil crisis and industrial job losses, had been on a mission to go green and transform its economy. Samsø, an island of 4,000 people off the Jutland Peninsula and reliant on coal and oil from the mainland, responded to the call to create a model community of green innovation and technology. “We were struggling with a loss of jobs and an ageing population, too few kids to maintain a good school system, a roaring urbanisation draining all the resources out of rural districts,” says Søren Hermansen, a farmer born and raised on the island. “So, we were fighting to avoid that and we thought, ‘here is maybe an opportunity if we make this transition’… not because we want to save the world but or the climate but more to save ourselves. It was a very pragmatic attitude.”
The island won the competition, and Hermansen has been the driving force behind the transformation that followed. Wind turbine projects were up and running within a few years, followed by district heating, generating heat centrally before distribution to local areas. Today, after investments totalling €57 million, Samsø has 11 onshore and 10 offshore wind turbines, four biomass-fuelled district heating plants, solar panels and electric vehicles. The transition has created jobs and depopulation has been stemmed. The island has effectively become carbon neutral and aims to become completely carbon-free by 2030.
“Islands offer opportunities to test complex systems — if it works in Outermost Regions, it can work anywhere in Europe,” Professor Mathieu David of the University of La Réunion told a September 2025 conference in Brussels organised by TwInSolar, a project aimed at boosting the energy transition in the French Indian Ocean island. Schemes highlighted at the meeting included the development of hydrogen hubs in the Canaries, and citizen-led energy projects on Scottish islands. The European Commission’s “Clean energy for EU islands” initiative seeks to facilitate the transition of more than 2,400 inhabited islands. One study funded by the European Commission and revised in July 2025 described how some European islands were taking the lead in the green energy transition. “These islands face unique challenges with regards to managing their energy systems, including fluctuating energy demand due to tourism, high energy production costs and related emissions, weak electricity grids, limited technical expertise and difficult access to finance. However, the advantages that they have-abundant renewable energy potential, tight-knit communities and high energy prices make them ideal playgrounds for the testing of innovative energy solutions,” it reported.
“Crete is one of the richest landscapes in terms of renewables because of its abundance in natural resources and plethora of climate conditions. For almost 300 days a year it's full of sun, so it’s the perfect place to harness solar energy through photovoltaics. There’s also a very big wind capacity in mountainous regions, so we can install wind turbines – plus there’s great potential from agricultural and livestock farming byproducts,” says Elissaios Sarmas, project manager for Crete Valley. The five-year Horizon Europe scheme on the Mediterranean’s fifth-largest island, co-funded by the European Union, aims to establish one of the first “Renewable Energy Valleys” (REVs) in Europe”. This consists of four innovation hubs in the east of the island known as Community Energy Labs (CELs), each using local renewable sources to meet the communities’ annual energy needs. State of the art digital tools and business models are being developed to meet the complexity of such an innovative project. “First and foremost is to convince the citizens about the energy transition because everything can be received with scepticism if not conveyed correctly,” Sarmas adds. “They are sceptical towards new wind turbines disturbing their sight, about the effects of a biogas unit for example, which may bring an unpleasant smell during the combustion process. But we have managed to convince them through a socio-technological systemic approach for co-designing the REV, that brings citizens to the front row of decision making. This is one of the biggest challenges and is ongoing.”
Getting local people on board wasn’t all plain sailing on Samsø either. Søren Hermansen says many, including the mayor, initially dismissed the renewable energy drive as a “fantasy project from Copenhagen”. There were suspicions over how much the rollout of district heating would cost, and “trust was a big question”. Putting the community at the heart of the transition has been central to the project, and the renewable energy projects are 100% locally owned. Hermansen argues that community involvement if not direct ownership is key to success; people must be able to “see the opportunity”. “Social contracting here is what we're good at because we learned by heart that we cannot just give it to developers or to businesses to do it.”
A second obstacle for Crete Valley according to Elissaios Sarmas is what he describes as Greece’s “strict legislative framework” that mostly “does not provide incentives to energy communities”. “For example, there are many laws that have stalled new installations of photovoltaic parks for the past two years in Crete. Even if an application for a communal PV park receives the initial approval to participate in the licensing contest, it automatically gets placed at the bottom of the seeding list and it will be evaluated when there is no electrical space available.” On the other hand, and on a more positive note, “old laws that were passed several decades ago but which have never been used, are now being brought back to life,” he says. “Our most recent example is the completed licensing of a 2MW biomass plant that will be covering the thermal needs of 70 households and the municipal swimming pool. This project was the first of its kind to have its environmental conditions approved, even though the legislative framework had existed for more than 10 years”. This decision, Sarmas argues, shows that “the wind of change is blowing towards Crete, but there are still many battles to be fought”.
The Greek initiative has ambitions beyond integrating renewable energy sources in Crete. It aims to use the project as “a significant testbed for the future development of Renewable Energy Valleys in Europe”, and four “follower communities” are being set up in France, Ireland, Italy and Portugal. Samsø too has looked to export its knowhow: the Samsø Energy Academy receives 3,000 visitors a year and runs courses and workshops on sustainable development. Søren Hermansen, its CEO, argues that among the advantages of being an island is the interdependence of its people: “If I have a problem, I know the 10 most important people I can call… You have to understand what it means for your colleagues in farming, in business or in production, and that is a very important tool to use for the involvement and engagement of the population. I think that is much more complicated in a bigger community.”
For the European Commission-funded study, “guaranteeing a stable energy supply, independent of fossil fuels… remains a difficult task” for small and medium-sized islands. “The geographical separation of their power systems from the mainland energy markets, combined with the scarcity of local technology and skills, is the main problem to tackle in the years to come,” it argues. However, projects have shown “that islands are characterized by features (barriers/opportunities) that make them ideal laboratories for the deployment of technical solutions and socio-economic approaches that can then be replicated on the mainland to support ambitious EU climate-related targets.”
A further challenge to such goals is posed by a Washington administration openly hostile to science-led policies, and intent on spreading its influence. “We reject the disastrous ‘climate change’ and ‘Net Zero’ ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threaten the United States, and subsidize our adversaries,” states the U.S. National Security Strategy published by the White House in November 2025. Søren Hermansen acknowledges “a little Trump effect all over Europe” but believes its impact can be kept at bay: “These guys don't like green energy. They like oil and gas and the old, traditional structures. So I think in the coming years we'll be under pressure,” he says. “But there's another element from the market: the cheapest energy is from solar and wind these days. That is a fact you cannot really get around, and that must mean something.”