Visitors to the Croatian isle of Cres, with its vivid blue Adriatic waters, rolling lush farmland, and quaint villages, will regularly be reminded by locals to relax, because, as the island motto goes, there’s “no stress on Cres.”
Apart from a lack of stress, there’s another thing largely absent from Cres — and that’s solar energy, even though the island lies off Croatia’s sun-kissed coast.
But a group of islanders is now trying to harness the power of the 3,000 hours of sun they enjoy yearly and help the community decarbonize by 2040 with a citizen-owned solar power plant. The planned project is fully crowdfunded.
“We’ve done a homemade YouTube video basically of two or three minutes,” said Franjo Toic, manager of the Apsyrtides energy cooperative, which was set up in 2021 and is behind the 500-kilowatt solar plant. “We showed what is going to be, what we are focused on, who we are.”
Franjo Toic at a sheep-shearing contest. Toic manages the Apsyrtides energy cooperative and rears sheepImage: Bojan Puric Toic, who was born on Cres and works for the local municipality, said the response was enormous. Within just three weeks of opening the campaign, Apsyrtides had raised €100,000. Their goal had been €60,000.
“We were quite surprised about the local community movement, and they were quite eager,” added Toic, who like many on the island, also rears sheep.
Cres and its inhabitants are well ahead of the solar energy curve in Croatia. Around 1% of electricity came from solar in 2022, although its coast is one of the sunniest places in Europe.
Croatia lags on solar energy, but trend is shifting At first glance, the small Balkan country looks like a renewables haven. Some 65% of its electricity comes from green sources, mainly from old Yugoslav-era hydropower plants and a little wind and biomass.
Still, it’s heavily dependent on climate-wrecking fossil fuels, which accounted for around 36% of the country’s electricity needs in 2022. And as climate change-related drought increases, hydropower can’t keep up with demand. Imported coal, oil and gas are filling the gap.
“In Croatia, we have exhausted all of our hydropower resources,” said Andro Bacan, a renewable energy expert at the state-owned Energy Institute Hrvoje Pozar back in the busy capital Zagreb.
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Expanding solar power seems like a no-brainer if the country is to cut its CO2 emissions 45% by 2030 but lagging regulation, grid connection issues and slow bureaucracy are hampering the technology, said Bacan.
Still, there is some progress, he said. The last five years have seen an increase in the amount of installed solar capacity, even if it remains small at 220 megawatts. Bacan believes that trend will continue.
A mix of factors, including a drop in solar prices, newly introduced tax relief for installing rooftop panels, and a desire for energy security resulting from Russia’s war in Ukraine are driving new interest in the green energy source, said Mislav Kirac, program coordinator at Green Energy Cooperative or ZEZ.
“We are seeing a momentum,” Kirac said. “Local authorities are starting to understand that their source of energy or their energy resilience or crisis resilience is important … and it’s getting more into the mainstream than it was five years ago.”
Red tape and mistrust hampering energy cooperatives Energy analyst Bacan says cooperatives like ZEZ are playing a “crucial role” in expanding solar with their projects and by raising awareness.
ZEZ was initially set up in 2013 as part of a United Nations project to develop energy co-ops in the country. They were “pioneers in this particular niche,” said Kirac, speaking from the organization’s office in a nondescript building in one of Zagreb’s leafy neighborhoods.
“There were literally none then,” added Kirac.
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