Colombia Cases: 31 Documented Energy Communities

Where they are

Project map

Point color indicates project status. Shape and opacity indicate location precision. Click any point to see its figures.

No point on this map is an exact location

Zero of the 31 projects have site coordinates in the source. The 28 points you see were geocoded from the municipality or corregimiento (rural subdivision) that the research declares: 17 are municipal centroids and 11 are corregimiento points. None marks where the panels actually are.

That is why the map draws municipal centroids as dashed circles rather than pins: the area communicates the uncertainty that a solid point would hide. Miichi Ka'i, for example, consists of 148 communities scattered across rural Uribia; its circle is at the municipal center because there is nothing better, not because the project is there.

Not on the map

The three projects that cannot be located

They exist, they are documented, and they count toward the 31. They simply have no defensible centroid, and placing an invented pin would be worse than leaving them off the map. Here they are.

Embera Reserves in Choco

Choco - Carmen de Atrato and Unguia - Under construction

Collective reparations program with 40 solar panel units for over 6,000 people who are conflict victims, from the Embera Chami and Embera Katio communities. Covers the La Puria and Consuelo Parte Baja reserves (Carmen de Atrato) and Citara and Ziparado de Tanela reserves (Unguia).

Why it is not mapped: four reserves in two distant municipalities, with no single defensible centroid. The source does not declare capacity.

Ecoparcelas — Atucsara Association

Cauca - Operational

Food and energy sovereignty model active since 1994, with over 250 families. 15 ecoparcels completed and 15 additional ones expected, combining solar energy with agroecological practices.

Why it is not mapped: the source only indicates the department of Cauca, without a municipality. No capacity is declared.

Soling del Sinu — Island Minigrids

Bolivar and Cordoba - Technical problems

10-year operation contract signed in September 2022 for solar minigrids on three Caribbean islands: Isla Fuerte (~600 families according to the source), Isla Mucura, and Santa Cruz del Islote.

Why it is not mapped: three distinct and distant islands with no single defensible centroid. The source declares neither capacity nor a total beneficiary count.

Six projects in detail

The Colombian cases

Firsts in their category, largest of their kind, or the ones that teach the most from what went wrong.

Illustrative photo: aerial view of solar panels over a meadow

Valle del Cauca - Jamundi

Bocas del Palo

First energy community of the Colombian Pacific. Agrivoltaic array with vegetable farming beneath the panels. The Consejo Comunitario de Comunidades Negras (Afro-Colombian community council) manages the surplus: COP $13.5 million transferred. Celsia operates O&M for the first 2 years; 30-year loan-for-use agreement.

101.4 kWp declared capacity

115 families

$2,239 M FENOGE 70% + Celsia 30%

Illustrative photo: solar panels in front of an institutional building

La Guajira - Uribia

Miichi Ka'i ("House of the Sun")

82 nanogrids + 40 microgrids + 183 individual PV systems for 148 Wayuu communities. 24/7 service with communication antennas, water pumping, and food refrigeration. Named by the communities in Wayuunaiki, with direct participation in design and execution.

1,067.85 kWp declared capacity

1,409 families

$47,000 M IPSE investment

Illustrative photo: manual installation of a solar panel

Bolivar - Cartagena

Isla Grande Pending failures

Delivered in 2025 in the Corales del Rosario National Park. Previously, generators ran only 4 hours per night due to fuel costs. Over 20 islanders certified by SENA (national training service), and operations are managed by an energy community formed by Electropacifico and the community council. Technical failures reported pending resolution.

544.5 kWp + 710 kW diesel, 1,929 kWh battery

392 dwellings (IPSE)

$16,359 M IPSE investment

Illustrative photo: solar panel field under blue sky

Vichada - Cumaribo

Cumaribo — First Energy Municipality

Inaugurated in July 2024. Colombia's first "Energy Municipality": both urban and rural areas depend on 24/7 renewable energy, with diesel backup and lithium batteries.

4.8 MWp declared capacity

1,350 families

$20,484 M investment

Illustrative photo: aerial view of residential rooftops

Antioquia - Medellin

Laureles — First regulated community

Colombia's first regulated energy community under CREG (energy regulator) Resolution 101 072, activated in April 2026 in partnership with EPM. 20 users connected to panels on the roof of Unergy's office, with surplus distributed via EPM's grid.

Not disclosed capacity

20 users

20% bill savings

Illustrative photo: small wind turbine next to a solar panel

Antioquia - Medellin

Comunidad Solar La Estrecha

First grid-connected community energy project in Colombia (2020), in the El Salvador neighborhood. The only community with a legalized connection to the grid operator and commercial boundaries registered with XM (grid operator). 43 panels on 3 rooftops; ~3,000 kWh/month average; 74% high satisfaction.

Not disclosed capacity (only 43 panels)

24 families

2020 first grid-connected

Photographs are illustrative and sourced from stock image banks: they are not records of the described projects.

31 real projects, failures included

16 departments, 22 operational. From the agrivoltaics of Jamundi and the Wayuu nanogrids of Uribia to the batteries that exploded in Mucura and the collapsed system of Santa Cruz del Islote. A catalog where everything works is useless for planning.

The numbers

Impact summary

Only what is aggregable gets aggregated. Investment is in COP for all cases that disclose it, so comparison is possible. Capacities and beneficiaries are not.

10 of 31 projects disclose their investment. The other 21 say "Not disclosed" or only name the funding source without an amount, and do not appear here. Sol de Perija (USD $8.49 million) and La Victoria (USD $1.4 million) are in dollars: converting them would require choosing an exchange rate and date the source does not declare, so they are not included either.

This is an exclusive and complete division of all 31 projects, so a donut chart is correct. Includes the project whose status the source does not declare (Capurgana/Acandi) rather than assuming it operational.

Why there is no total capacity or beneficiary count

Capacities cannot be added up

The 31 projects declare their capacity in five different units: kWp (9 projects), MWp (3), MW (3), kVA (1), and kW (1). And 14 declare no capacity at all: the source only gives the number of panels.

Coqui is 101 kVA — apparent power, not kWp. Puerto Cachicamo is 110.3 kW photovoltaic, not kWp. Converting kVA to kWp requires a power factor the source does not provide. Adding them all as if they were kWp would produce a round and false number.

Beneficiaries cannot be added up either

Beneficiary units number eleven: families, households, people, users, students, dwellings, communities, beneficiaries, inhabitants, and islanders — and 6 projects declare none at all.

Bojaya is 1,400 students. Manaure is 160 communities. Piamonte is 1,500 people. Providencia is 17,000 islanders. Dividing by an assumed family size to arrive at "households" would be inventing. None of these figures is interchangeable with the others.

Only what is aggregable gets aggregated

Only 10 of the 31 projects disclose their investment, and capacities come in five different units — kWp, MWp, MW, kVA, and kW — that cannot be summed. Honesty about what the data does not allow us to say is the point of this page, not a limitation to hide.

Unfiltered

What went wrong

A catalog where everything works is useless for planning. These are the problems the research documents, with the same level of detail as the successes.

Soling del Sinu — the batteries exploded

The batteries exploded on Isla Mucura in October 2023. The Santa Cruz del Islote system has collapsed. Reliability problems are reported across all three islands covered by the 10-year operation contract signed in September 2022 (Isla Fuerte, Isla Mucura, and Santa Cruz del Islote).

Why it matters: this is the only project in the corpus classified as problematic, and it shows that the risk of island minigrids is not in the installation but in long-term operation and maintenance.

Isla Grande — pending technical failures

Delivered in 2025 with 544.5 kWp, 710 kW diesel backup, and 1,929 kWh lithium batteries. Technical failures reported pending resolution. The beneficiary count is also unclear: IPSE (off-grid energy institute) reports 392 dwellings and commercial establishments (~300 families), while the operator source reports a range of 362-477 families.

Bahia Malaga — inaugurated with problems

327 solar panels for 291 families and 14 community buildings; communities went from 4 to 24 continuous hours of electricity. Inaugurated in May 2025 with reported problems. The source only indicates the number of panels, not their rating: no capacity in kWp is declared.

P2P Pilot Medellin — the uncomfortable finding

The local energy market pilot (2021) with 25 households managed to reduce bills by up to 7% and improve self-sufficiency by 18.2%. But its key conclusion was negative: residential batteries are not financially viable for low-income prosumers at current costs.

Capurgana / Acandi — unknown status

3,500 solar panels in a solar-diesel hybrid configuration and COP $31,500 million invested, operated by the Junta Administradora de Servicios Publicos de Capurgana (local utility board). The source does not declare the project's operational status. It is not assumed to be operational: on the map it appears in gray, as "status not documented."

Figure conflicts that were not resolved silently

Cali declares 4,320 kWp according to FENOGE (national energy fund); the alternative figure of 4,055 kWp is obtained by multiplying 2.18 kWp per home by the 1,860 installed systems. The declared figure is preferred, and the other is recorded.

Barranquilla: the 14 MWp across 5 farms is the total program target, not what has been built. Phase 1, approved in September 2024, consists of 2 farms of ~1 MW each, meaning ~2 MWp.