Accelerating Community Energy Transformation (ACET) and the Community Energy Association (CEA) have signed a partnership agreement that will connect applied research to real-world action in small, medium, rural, and Indigenous communities. The agreement builds on the organizations’ successful collaboration in early 2025, which brought together CEA’s Northern BC Climate Action Network and the ACET project, the Northern Regional Energy Dialogues, to convene conversations across northern BC related to local views of the energy transition.

The first projects launching in 2026 will focus on addressing urgent community challenges—such as misinformation, capacity gaps, or governance barriers. ACET and CEA will also begin identifying and scoping projects that could cover topics such as AI-assisted community decision making, complex systems planning, peer network-generated problem identification and solution development, and labour force capacity development.

The partnership agreement represents an ongoing opportunity to leverage the distinct strengths and expertise of the two organizations and collaboratively identify initiatives that blend academic and practitioner perspectives from the outset. The result will be focused pilot implementation projects that will move communities forward based on their real-world needs, while informing research to accelerate clean energy solutions.

“Our work with ACET will enable equitable energy transformations in communities that are often underserved or overlooked, but have untapped potential to be leaders on community energy projects. A critical part of this is ensuring that the people in those communities are not just recipients of change, but co-creators of it together with practitioners and researchers,” says CEA’s CEO Megan Lohmann, who lives in Ktunaxa ʔamakʔis, the territory of the Ktunaxa Nation, Fernie, BC.

"This partnership is based on a shared belief that research plays a critical role in community energy transformations, and the reverse it true as well - with communities and practitioners generating valuable insights that contribute to driving great research,” says Curran Crawford, Executive Director of ACET. “This partnership creates a long-needed platform that responds to community needs in B.C. by providing them with the means to turn clean energy ideas into action."