Energy communities goes back to the 1970s with the oil price shocks to ensure affordability of energy in communities. Currently in Europe there is the mandate of clear regulation in favor of energy communities that are the more relevant given the current and expected future energy inflation.
To follow along the progress of the energy community framework, where we can see all the projects taking place in europe. Notable the existance of 4000 projects in Germany, comparing to 200 in Spain.
Currently, half of european households could be involved in projects related to energy communities or being more independing in their energy use. Energy communities are called as such if at least 51% is owner locally (how far local remains something to make concrete and varies across countries).
Energy communities are organizations where citiziens own and participate in energy provisioning or efficiency related projects. The areas of activities are hydroelectric dams, solar panels, wind turbines for energy production and distribution. Also the provision of services could be done for electric vehicles, homes and commercial area (mainly community buildings like schools and hospitals).
Energy communities also provide tutoring, informational and awareness activities to expand its presence and engage more people in society.
Principles of Energy Communities
Decentralized is one of the key principles. That means that many small producers are part of the provisioning of energy. There is a problem with accumulation and distribution, and the grid is not ready to receive in both directions energy. In Germany, a significant part of the renewable energy comes from local producers, which creates a lot of complexities interacting with the centralized systems, normally power by fossil fuels and nuclear reactors. There is a strong claim that centralization is necessary and only large projects to ensure that the grid works smoothly.
People Centered citizens becomes providers and not only consumers. It is important but challenging, first there is significant paper work, geographical limits (solar is not best for all) and building limits (high buildings require additional sources). The motivation of members are normally environmnetal, pariticipation and autonomy;instead of cost savings or investments.
Social: the energy communities aimed to have a positive social impact, and not for profit only. Some of the positives is wider support from local community, lead to more sustainable life styles that are less energy intensive... This is not clear even on places like Germany or Austria where switching to a renewable energy is relatively easy, but there is not sufficient transparency of where and from whom does it come from. Another overlooked problem is that any type of energy set up does not lead necessary to an improvement in the gender equality and the burden of home and care.
Small-scale technology and decentralised ownership, in the field of energy and beyond, are commonly regarded as potential precursors of a sustainable degrowth society.
Energy communities can, despite the challenges, become true blueprints for a turn towards a degrowth practice that will foster the democratisation of renewable energy production.
Fischer Kowalski and Haberl (2007) argue that the current transition to renewables opens a window of opportunity for a ‘post-fossil’’ development path beyond the trajectory of an extensive and still-growing industrial metabolism. Victor (2012) adds that this transition is imperative to a mitigation of climate change. In fact, there has been a remarkable increase in renewable energy generation across Europe in recent years (Eurostat 2013), but the emergence of degrowth societies is still only discernible in a few niches.
Our argument centres on the important role that social movements and political goals play when linking energy transition initiatives to a degrowth approach.
The participation and ownership structure of CPE must be based on the inclusion of its normative goals.
The profit motive and growth imperative in onlyfor profit private enterprises will always dominate and may even completely prevent such efforts, or else limit them to marginal improvements or mere PR strategies.
The normative goals of alternative energy projects typically comprise at least one of the following issues: an overall reduction of energy consumption, the protection of biodiversity, sustainable agriculture, a transition town agenda or, closely related, more social equity and the empowerment of disadvantaged social groups.
A thus defined legal form of property alone does not guarantee the pursuit of a social and ecological transition. As Cumbers (2012: 165) argues, public or collective forms of ownership can, however, serve as a means to achieve wider goals, such as local community control, distributional justice, environmental sustainability and improved participation. In contrast to conventional private corporate ownership, public and collective ownership opens up possibilities for the social and ecological transformation that degrowth is calling for, though it does in no way automatically guarantee the implementation of such goals (cf. Christman 1994).
Collective localism: Machynlleth in Wales
The wind energy project in Machynlleth implicitly followed a degrowth agenda. The overall aim consisted in providing locally produced electricity, a goal that was accompanied by the attempt to also have an impact on the population’s lifestyle regarding energy consumption.
As indicated on the project’s web page, whenever a surplus was produced, some local households in the community were also supplied.
At least a third of the revenues were donated to a fund, whose goal was to support all local households in their effort to save energy, for instance by applying to government programmes that would pay for more effective house insulations (ibid.). The project further aimed for changes in the population’s behaviour and in reducing its overall consumption.
In general, these projects form a network of niches that developed as the result of a horizontal learning process inspired by local best-practice examples, which were then exported and translated to other, more or less similarly conditioned places (Kunze and Becker 2014).
Machynlleth was not only successful with regard to its community-based character, but also in terms of implementing political ideals of greening energy consumption and putting them into practice.
Transcending localism: Somenergia in Spain and Retenergie in Italy
Somenergia has realised five larger photovoltaic plants (1168 KWh annually) and a biogas plant (2.2 GWh annually). It further intends to set up Spain’s first citizenowned wind turbine. Retenergie has set up 7 small and medium size photovoltaic plants with a total capacity of 470 MWh annually.
From the very beginning, they were committed to an environmentalist and strictly participatory codex. For Somenergia, the core values entail the political and financial participation of all members, autonomy, and independence of local groups as well as the education of and collaboration with social movements in energy matters (Somenergia 2013). Retenergie appears even more determined, listing many environmental concerns in its statutes, including ‘‘respecting the soil.’’ They are committed to the exclusive use of nonagrarian land for energy generation (Retenergie 2009).
The listing indicates that the two cooperatives were not only initiated to generate energy, but also to propagate a set of social and environmental values that are of central importance to the degrowth discourse.
The spatial expansion and continuous growth of these two initiatives posed new challenges in terms of their internal participatory structure. Both cooperatives developed a federalist structure consisting of central boards and local sub-units that are granted a varying degree of autonomy.
Generalising collective energy in urban spaces: the Berlin Energy Roundtable
With around 3.5 million inhabitants, Berlin is not only a major city, but the social and technical complexity of both its energy provision and its network operation obviously also require measures of a
different size (Moss et al. 2014).
Secondly, the objectives were here not limited to the development of one particular organisation, but aimed at a general regulation of energy.
Thirdly, the attempt to introduce a collective ownership pattern provoked an extensive political debate regarding the future of the city’s energy system, particularly because it not only contested the city council’s reluctance to debate its energy policy, but also because it questioned the status quo, namely a corporate mode of energy provision (Becker et al. 2015).
Berlin case study thus marks a contrast to the previously presented examples in that the attempted establishment of a new form of participatory collective ownership was, in itself, a political project. It aimed to achieve a legally binding result by mobilising the power that a direct democracy grants its citizens. In addition, the combination of participatory measures, socio-political ambitions, and accentuated environmental and degrowth goals subsumed a wide spectrum of social movements under the mantle of a common and concrete political project.
Discussion
Renewable energy is always a contribution to a less destructive mode of production, as, in comparison to fossil energy, it reduces the ecological impact of generating one unit of energy (D’Alessandro et al. 2010; Schneider et al. 2010).
However, by providing the basis for a social metabolism that is bound to grow, all energy production (renewables are here no exception) is inseparable from the growth paradigm inscribed in the latter (Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl 2007).
A large part, if not the majority of renewable energy production exclusively follows profit maximisation when replacing fossil power plants and does not do so to challenge the growth and acceleration logic of capital accumulation (cf. Altvater 2011). Thus, only a minor part of renewable energy is produced by organisations that pursue a degrowth agenda. Even among collective projects, we found that degrowth policies only accounted for a small fraction of our sample.
To define the CPE concept, we have combined two possible characteristics of an organisation: a political motivation and a collective endeavour that has been put into practice.
In this respect, we highlight the organisational creativity that leads to remarkable social innovations, such as those observed in the cases of Somenergia and Retenergie. Essentially, these projects contribute to a democratisation of the economy (Cumbers 2012; Scheer 2012).
Furthermore, we understand the political and normative goals of CPE as inseparable from their collective approach to issues of ownership and decision-making. On the one hand, this observation can be related to the discourse on cooperatives as a ‘‘type of enterprise potentially less vulnerable to a one-sided focus on maximising returns on (potentially spurious) production, growth of production and the scale of its operations’’.
Here, public or private ownership is not the only decisive factor. In practice, it may prove more important that CPE members retain their factual decision-making power so that they can, for in-
stance, keep an eye on normative goals beyond returns, such as degrowth.
But from the perspective of a theoretical analysis, it could be argued that the chance to make larger investment in the cooperatives and to thus also earn larger shares of its profits will probably be distributed along the already existing lines of financial inequality (Yildiz et al. 2015). The existing
structure of social inequality in a given population is thus reproduced rather than thoroughly transformed by CPE (cf. Kunze 2012: 107f.).
What CPE does certainly achieve is a certain exclusion of big institutional capital, which is nearly always accompanied by a disconnection of place and ownership.
This shows that to have a significant impact on the entire social metabolism, CPE have to grow beyond the niches in which they emerged (cf. Spa ̈th and Rohracher 2014). To enable a shift towards a degrowth society, some sectors, like renewable energy, still have to grow considerably before they can fully replace destructive industries like the fossil generation of energy (Schneider et al. 2010: 512; Latouche 2009; D’Alessandro et al. 2010).
How alternatives to the growth logic of capital could be global and local at the same time, so that they would be suited for upscaling and expansion (cf. North 2005). In short, to adapt the givens of the global political economy, alternatives should be neither only local nor placeless and global, but instead ‘‘multi-scalar’’ (Mu ̈ller 2006: 146).
Conclusion
This paper introduced the idea of collective and politically motivated renewable projects (CPE) as a
heuristic tool to broaden the debate on small-scale renewable energy.
These projects can be seen as degrowth initiatives because they seek to reduce the per capita
energy consumption and integrate ecological principles into their business practice.
By trying to influence consumption patterns, they fuse the fields of consumption and production (D’Alisa and Cattaneo 2013; Lorek and Fuchs 2013). What is more, they delineate new forms of organisation that chiefly result fro purposeful agency, which has set alternative ideas into practice (Latouche 2009; Rao et al. 2000). They further exemplify the difficulties, constraints, and contradictions of niche degrowth projects (Schwartzman 2012), which often struggle to survive in a hostile environment. Because they are politically motivated projects, they finally often link degrowth to other social movements (Martinez-Alier 2012).
Recent EU legislation highlights RECs’ social role in energy poverty alleviation and stipulates the participation of all social groups in RECs, especially those groups that are underrepresented under RECs’ members.
Still, empirical evidence of RECs’ capacity to include underrepresented and vulnerable groups and mitigate energy poverty as a particular form of energy justice remains scarce.
Energy communities contribute to energy decentralisation, and by enabling citizen participation, they contribute to energy democratisation. Furthermore, by investing in renewable energy projects locally, they increase awareness of energy transition and create value locally by improving income streams, developing skills, building capacity and reducing CO2 emissions . RECs may also facilitate community regeneration and autonomy.
In Europe, up to 82 million households struggle to pay their energy bills. Threatened by energy poverty, energy vulnerable groups are often excluded from shaping energy transition . In theory, RECs can engage with vulnerable groups and address energy poverty, e.g. by providing lower tariffs and increased energy efficiency.
Currently, only some social groups have the means (e.g. economic capital, time and know-how) to participate in RECs and benefit (e.g. through enabling frameworks) from the transition to clean energy . In Germany, for instance, REC members are typically middle-aged men with high income and a technical, higher education background. Other groups, predominantly low-income and (energy) vulnerable groups, remain underrepresented.
Conceptual approach and results
However, most European countries do not recognise energy poverty as an energy issue but consider it as income or social inequality. Consequently, national energy policymakers are often unaware of the existence and scope of energy poverty and the existing inequalities in energy access.
Participation in a REC can entail lower energy tariffs and benefits from dividends and services such as access to clean electricity or heating and energy savings or efficiency advice.
Thus, RECs’ business model, embedded in a competitive energy market, may limit their ability to open up to broader social groups. Further, motivations to set up and join a REC differ .
In Germany, the data available on energy communities’ motivations and their members’ motivation to join indicate a vast diversity. In general, smaller energy communities tend to be motivated to contribute to local energy transition and environmental protection. The larger the energy community gets in terms of members or investment volume, the more financial motives prevail over social inclusion.
For instance, the limited recognition of groups poorly positioned to take advantage of local approaches is mirrored by the prior discussed participatory prerequisites: Some are more likely to be recognised and participate in energy communities than others. In this light, we apply the concept of recognitional justice to understand whether existing REC procedures recognise these specific living conditions.
Concerning reasons for not addressing underrepresented groups and energy poverty, a majority states that these topics have not been discussed yet and underlines a need to focus on core business activities. In the open text replies, RECs indicate a lack of resources, mainly a lack of human resources and financial means and time to address underrepresented groups and energy poverty.
In general, unawareness of underrepresented groups and their needs and of energy poverty together with a need to focus on core business activities are the primary reason for not engaging in a social role.
Respondents understand share prices ranging from 50€ to 3000€ as facilitating the participation of underrepresented and vulnerable groups. This points to a lack of understanding of the financial constraints these groups often face. Other indicators such as the average minimum financial participation of 545€ per member in German RE cooperatives further highlight procedural shortcomings. Such high membership fees underpin a limited understanding of (energy) vulnerability and the exclusion effect financial membership requirements entail.
In general, 25 cases (35%) offer lower tariffs compared to market prices, 29 cases (41%) offer at least one form of energy efficiency measure, and 19 cases (27%) offer lower share prices or membership fees. Moreover, these already low numbers are further reduced when looking at RECs explicitly offering these services to underrepresented groups.
Here, we observe an underrepresentation of women both among members and board members (on
average less than 30 % of members are estimated (by respondents) to be female). During our interviews, it became clear that RECs often do not collect membership data to assess member diversity. Apart from gender, assessing which groups are most underrepresented and including categories such as age or ethnicity is difficult. Moreover, 41 cases (58%) report not addressing underrepresented groups at all.
Conclusions
RECs actively contributing to energy justice by engaging with vulnerable and underrepresented groups and providing access to their beneficial services to alleviate energy poverty remain the exception.
While our research highlights their willingness, RECs express various restrictions and challenges, limiting their capacity to address energy justice. In general, we observe that, while most are locally embedded, limited understanding of and engagement with energy vulnerability prevails. As a result, the recognition of energy (in)justices, the implementation of adequate procedures to involve vulnerable groups to provide them with a voice and deliver fairer energy services are limited.
RECs report financial instability, lack of personnel, and knowledge about energy poverty, limiting their ability to engage in a social role.
Taking Energy Systems From Profit-Making to Ensuring Wellbeing
Chris Vettos argues for more autonomy and longer-term approaches to energy security and looks to energy communities across Europe taking this approach.
Citizens across the EU are reappropriating the means of energy production through collective solutions such as energy communities. They illustrate what a truly just, sustainable, beyond-profit energy transition could look like.
It’s not a coincidence that publicly traded oil corporations, like Shell, Exxon and Total, have seen their profits soar by tens of billions of euros since February 2022. The EU’s energy market architecture, not only prevents, but actively facilitates this exorbitant accumulation of windfall profits. The marginal pricing systems means that the wholesale price of electricity is linked with that of gas (the most expensive source), thus even in countries like Denmark, Greece or Lithuania, where there is a high penetration of renewables in the grid, electricity prices still remain exorbitantly high.
And as geopolitical and climate crises further compound, the window of opportunity for a deliberative discussion on the future, democratic, equitable and sustainable energy system of tomorrow, will close rapidly, paving the way for further haphazard, band-aid solutions, like scrambling for new fossil gas investments in third countries.
The EU Commission recently came forth with a revised Stability and Growth Pact, which still lacks the ambition of shifting the EU beyond eternal growth seeking but opens a window of opportunity to steer away from strict austerity. Hundreds of civil society, academic and trade union organisations recently signed an open letter towards the EU, urging it to prioritise human wellbeing and sustainability over profit in its economic governance.
A rallying call, an academic field, an activist movement, degrowth is ever-evolving and by definition pluralistic. In a nutshell, it calls for an equitable downscaling of resource and energy throughput, whilst ensuring that everybody lives a meaningful life within planetary boundaries.
Degrowth fundamentally recognises that a mere switch to renewable energy will not suffice to bring the world into a safe and just space. A broader reconfiguration of socio-economic relations is urgently needed. Is deliberative democracy as flashy as sending Teslas into space? Probably not, but it sure is more legitimate when the future of the planet is at stake.
As one panellist at a recent event organised by the Green European Foundation eloquently put it: “the times are urgent – we need to slow down”.
In 2018, with its landmark Clean Energy for All Europeans Package of Directives, the EU has legally recognised the right of citizens to produce, self-consume, store and even distribute renewable energy. This marks a monumental shift from the status quo of centralised, fossil politics, towards a pluralistic, clean, decentralised energy system.
Their primary purpose is to deliver societal and environmental benefits, not profit, while revenues are distributed amongst multiple members and largely reinvested into local economies.
Emphasis should be given here to how the community reconceptualises energy as a common good and a human right, not a tradeable commodity, whilst embodying the degrowth principles of sufficiency and autonomy. The community’s decision-making always passes through a deliberative process of voting in the General Assembly.
The renewable “go-to areas” proposed under the REPowerEU strategy are meant to address the severe bottleneck of permitting times, by cutting the red tape of environmental and spatial planning legislation. Multiple civil society organisations have pointed out the flawed logic behind this argument, as project development delays are mostly owed to inefficient and understaffed public agencies, lack of expert personnel, and supply chain disruptions. Civil society counter-proposes to exhaust the range of renewable-friendly surfaces across (peri)urban zones before moving to agricultural and natural areas, whilst setting and enforcing strict limits on protected areas.
We need to stay with the trouble, as Donna Haraway would put it; to slow down and ask ourselves these uncomfortable questions of how we got here and what do we need to start doing differently from now on. Rescoop.eu, the European Federation of Energy Cooperatives, currently represents more than 1900 cooperatives, accounting for 1.25 million citizens from 22 EU countries. 1900 cooperatives that are pursuing a plurality of socio-ecological goals, like gender equality, tackling energy poverty, fighting climate change, targeting mobility poverty, and upskilling and educating their members.
Cooperatives that engage their local communities to sketch out on a drawing board where and how to install new renewable energy projects, to power through the energy transition with speed, but also democratic deliberation and legitimacy. Energy communities are stepping up every day to build that social buy-in for renewables, weaving it deeply into the fabric of our communities through everyday practices of empowerment, such as talks, workshops, door canvassing, and even art and games. The (degrowth) energy revolution is already here, not with a bang, but surely and steadfastly doing the snail work in the limelight.
It is suggested that community renewable energy projects are at a crossroads. While many projects have familiarized thousands of people with alternative economic models, there is little evidence of a general change in attitudes towards technology, consumption, or equity.
Roughly half of the installed capacity of renewable energy in Germany is owned by citizens (Trend:research Institut & Leuphana Universität, 2013).
To date, in Germany, the predominant technology used in CRE has been photovoltaic, especially in energy cooperatives, whereas wind energy has been used predominately by corporations such as limited partnerships with a limited liability company as the general partner (GmbH & Co. KG).
Thus, financial incentives should usually work in favor of prosumers or the direct marketing of produced electricity. However, administrative burdens make it difficult for smaller actors to benefit from direct marketing. For instance, electricity produced from renewables must be registered in a system (Herkunftsnachweisregister) run by the federal environmental agency (Umweltbundesamt).
Because “wind turbines exhibit economies of scale in terms of declining investment per kW with increasing turbine capacity” (Blanco, 2009, p. 1375) and because such scale economies might also exist in operations and maintenance, larger turbines and projects are usually more competitive (Blanco, 2009). Taken together, these developments work in favor of growth-oriented supra-regional business
models.
Bottom-up initiatives must be based on low-energy technologies that require lower levels of bureaucratic control than green or brown high-energy technologies (Illich, 1974). Being skeptical about expert knowledge, the Degrowth research community instead adopts the post-normal science approach, considering the interests and expertise of diverse stakeholders (Cattaneo et al., 2012). Deliberative processes will bring legitimacy for the Great Transformation, which is tested in small participatory communities by pioneers of change (Schellnhuber et al., 2011).
With respect to distributive justice in the German energy sector, a more nuanced picture emerges. In this context, it was largely the middle class that benefited, but without necessarily making the poorest worse off. Hence, this result could be considered to be an injustice (Yildiz et al., 2015). However, the poorest also benefited from environmental profits, which could lead to the conclusion that according to the Rawlsian approach to justice (Rawls, 1971), an increase in inequality may be justified.
In this context, it is important to note that there is considerable regional heterogeneity in natural potential for renewable energy from solar, wind, biomass, or hydropower in Germany. For instance, the natural potential for wind power is large in the North, whereas the South has greater potential for photovoltaics. Such heterogeneity in natural potential could also impact legal forms and member motivations in CRE projects (cf. Holstenkamp and Kahla, 2016; Radtke 2016).
CRE changes the dominant type of technology in the energy system. While PV supports a modern subsistence lifestyle, wind energy is more dependent on centralized production and finance. In conclusion, it remains to be seen whether new phenomena such as small wind turbines based on open source ecology technical designs can gain momentum in CRE initiatives.
Thus, CRE shows some parallels with the Degrowth movement by emphasizing social relations and community welfare as a path to contributing to social change. In summary, CRE projects are often torn between aspiration and reality, and broader outcomes in the Degrowth sense remain to be seen.
The structural level and dominating policies such as the Renewable Energy Act shape realities
on the ground. Recent reforms work in favor of large investors and are further stimulating green consumerism. Low levels of actual involvement in decision-making raise doubts about the survival and future direction of what had begun as a promising movement.
Few members in CRE projects are critical of technology, and as such, few members explicitly criticize excessive consumption and energy use. In fact, CRE is dominated by technophile eco-modernists.
Currently, CRE is at a crossroads. CRE initiatives could follow a path of green growth by focusing on green technology and substituting for hazardous fossil and nuclear energy sources. High investments in energy infrastructure and low prices for renewable energy could certainly lead to some environmental benefits.
However, CRE could also follow a Degrowth path. CRE initiatives would then have to take a more critical stance on technology and its rebound effects. The Degrowth path offers opportunities for localized business models, lower energy consumption through sufficiency strategies, and an understanding of CRE projects as providers of services.
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