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REVIEW
published: 05 April 2019
doi: 10.3389/fenrg.2019.00031
Frontiers in Energy Research | www.frontiersin.org 1April 2019 | Volume 7 | Article 31
Edited by:
Marti Rosas-Casals,
Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya,
Spain
Reviewed by:
Xiangyun Gao,
China University of Geosciences,
China
Timos Karpouzoglou,
Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
*Correspondence:
Richard J. Hewitt
richard.hewitt@hutton.ac.uk
Specialty section:
This article was submitted to
Energy Systems and Policy,
a section of the journal
Frontiers in Energy Research
Received: 12 October 2018
Accepted: 06 March 2019
Published: 05 April 2019
Citation:
Hewitt RJ, Bradley N,
Baggio Compagnucci A, Barlagne C,
Ceglarz A, Cremades R, McKeen M,
Otto IM and Slee B (2019) Social
Innovation in Community Energy in
Europe: A Review of the Evidence.
Front. Energy Res. 7:31.
doi: 10.3389/fenrg.2019.00031
Social Innovation in Community
Energy in Europe: A Review of the
Evidence
Richard J. Hewitt 1
*, Nicholas Bradley 2, Andrea Baggio Compagnucci 1, Carla Barlagne 2,
Andrzej Ceglarz 3,4 , Roger Cremades 5, Margaret McKeen 1, Ilona M. Otto 6and Bill Slee 7
1Information and Computational Sciences (ICS), The James Hutton Institute, Aberdeen, United Kingdom, 2Social, Economic
and Geographical Sciences (SEGS), The James Hutton Institute, Aberdeen, United Kingdom, 3Bavarian School of Public
Policy, Technical University Munich, Munich, Germany, 4Renewables Grid Initiative, Berlin, Germany, 5Climate Service Center
Germany (GERICS), Hamburg, Germany, 6Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Member of the Leibniz
Association, Potsdam, Germany, 7The Rural Development Company Alford, Aberdeenshire, United Kingdom
Citizen-driven Renewable Energy (RE) projects of various kinds, known collectively as
community energy (CE), have an important part to play in the worldwide transition
to cleaner energy systems. On the basis of evidence from 8 European countries,
we investigate CE, over approximately the last 50 years (c.1970–2018), through the
lens of Social Innovation (SI). We carry out a detailed review of literature around the
social dimension of renewable energy; we collect, describe and map CE initiatives
from Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the UK; and we
unpack the SI concept into 4 operational criteria which we suggest are essential to
recognizing SI in CE. These are: (1) Crises and opportunities; (2) the agency of civil
society; (3) reconfiguration of social practices, institutions and networks; (4) new ways
of working. We identify three main phases of SI in CE. The environmental movements
of the 1960s and the “oil shocks” of the 1970s provided the catalyst for a series of
innovative societal responses around energy and self-sufficiency. A second wave of SI
relates to the mainstreaming of RE and associated government support mechanisms.
In this phase, with some important exceptions, successful CE initiatives were mainly
confined to those countries where they were already embedded as innovators in the
previous phase. The third phase of CE innovation relates to the societal response to the
Great Recession that began in 2008 and lasted most of the subsequent decade. CE
initiatives formed around this time were also strongly focused around democratization of
energy and citizen empowerment in the context of rising energy prices, a weak economy,
and a production and supply system dominated by excessively powerful multinational
energy firms. CE initiatives today are more diverse than at any time previously, and are
likely to continue to act as incubators for pioneering initiatives addressing virtually all
aspects of energy. However, large multinational energy firms remain the dominant vehicle
for delivery of the energy transition, and the apparent excitement in European policy
circles for “community energy” does not extend to democratization of energy or genuine
empowerment of citizens.
Keywords: social innovation, community energy, renewable energy, cooperative, grassroots, crisis, participation,
energy democracy
Hewitt et al. Social Innovation in Community Energy
INTRODUCTION
With the goals of the Paris climate agreement looking difficult
to achieve (e.g., Kriegler et al., 2018; Larkin et al., 2018), and
Europe’s efforts to increase the proportion of RE in its energy
systems only partially successful (Figure 1), new approaches to
the clean energy transition are needed. This necessity, together
with citizens’ growing interest in sustainability and energy
democracy (Szulecki, 2018) offers both a clear motivation and
opportunity for communities to address both concerns together
by forging a new relationship with energy. In this context, a
wide range of community-led sustainable energy projects (CE)
are currently being implemented all around the world. European
countries are at the forefront of this emerging trend. CE is found
in diverse forms throughout Europe, including wind turbines
and solar farms in cooperative ownership that return profits to
local investors, mini-hydro-electricity schemes which power local
homes and businesses, farmer’s bioenergy collectives, church,
or community center renewable heat initiatives, locally-owned
energy distribution networks and “eco-villages” which promote
self-sufficiency, zero-waste and energy efficiency. The common
denominator that binds these diverse projects together is that all,
in some form or other, emphasize citizen participation around
the common issue of energy.
In this sense, the concept of social innovation (SI) is relevant.
SI refers to the reconfiguring of social practices in response to
societal challenges, with the aim of improving societal well-being
through the engagement of civil society actors (Polman et al.,
2017). It is this focus on civil society engagement that links CE
to SI—as an innovation in energy that emphasizes community
participation, CE is clearly a form of SI.
In fact, SI has been instrumental in citizen-based activity
associated with reducing emissions or increasing renewable
energy production (Harnmeijer et al., 2018). At present, however,
SI is still a contested concept. In 2013 a European Commission
document (European Commission, 2013) felt unable to offer a
precise definition. MacCallum et al. (2009) see reconfiguration
of social practices, institutions and networks as key elements
of social innovation where civil society agency creates new
ways of responding to crises and opportunities. We concur
with this conceptualization, which is broadly matched by
later commentators (Cajaiba-Santana, 2014). Social innovation,
in their view, “rejects the traditional, technology-focused
application of the term “innovation”... in favor of a more
nuanced reading which valorizes the knowledge and cultural
assets of communities and which foregrounds the creative
reconfiguration of social relations” (MacCallum et al. (2009: 1–
2). In this sense, the accelerating impacts of climate change
and ongoing struggle to transition to lower-carbon forms of
energy is clearly an outstanding opportunity to transform
societal approaches to energy itself. For example, diversifying
beyond fossil fuels opens energy production to a wider group
of stakeholders beyond traditional oil majors; at the same
time, decentralized energy generation offers an opportunity for
consumers to offer demand-management services through their
homes and devices. In effect, new opportunities have emerged
for citizens to become active partners in the management of
energy as a resource, rather than passive “consumers” of energy
as a commodity.
It is this idea of “creative reconfiguration of social relations”
around energy—innovation in forms of governance, institutions
and actor relationships—that underlies the concept of CE. Thus,
while CE is rarely described as social innovation, it seems to sit
comfortably within the definitions of social innovation offered by
Cajaiba-Santana and others.
Yet strategic approaches to energy transition currently being
advanced by European policy-makers remain firmly anchored to
this earlier “technology focused” innovation paradigm, and do
not seriously contemplate any form of genuine reconfiguration,
or “new social contract for energy.” This leads us to wonder
to what extent the phenomenon of CE, which has a large
and growing literature, and, in some countries, a degree of
government support, might offer potential to bring about real
change in the relationship between society, and energy Europe-
wide. In this paper, we strive to answer this question by
examining CE in Europe through the lens of SI. To this end, we
define two Research Objectives (ROs), as follows:
RO1: Develop a greater understanding of what constitutes
CE in Europe by reviewing relevant literature and collecting
evidence for CE initiatives from primary sources for a range of
European countries.
To understand SI in CE in Europe, we must first understand
CE. While there is a large and growing literature on CE itself, a
broad review of its form and extent across Europe is generally
lacking. There is a pressing need to map, characterize, and
investigate the range of CE initiatives across Europe, in order
to better understand the circumstances that lead to high levels
of development. While several projects, like the EU-funded
REScoop project (Vansintjan, 2015) or the Energy Archipelago
(Harnmeijer et al., 2012) have already begun to address this need,
the scientific literature remains somewhat disconnected from
the extensive publicly available information on individual CE
initiatives found in gray literature, news reports and community
websites. At the same time, the literature is generally focused
on CE in pioneering countries like Germany and Denmark with
few studies of the phenomenon in Southern Europe (Candelise
and Ruggieri, 2017; Heras-Saizarbitoria et al., 2018), or the
former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe
(Holstenkamp, 2018).
RO2: Apply social innovation criteria based on literature
review and data collection exercise as a framework for analysis
of the CE phenomenon in our case study countries.
While SI clearly provides a useful conceptual framework for
the study of CE, there are few studies that do this directly. To
fill this research gap is important for two key reasons. Firstly,
while broadly supportive statements about CE can be found
on European Commission sponsored websites (e.g., https://
climatepolicyinfohub.eu/community-energy-projects-europes-
pioneering-task), it is unclear to what extent meaningful
community participation is actually a significant feature of
mainstream renewable energy developments in Europe today; SI,
as we have explained, offers an ideal framework for investigating
this. Secondly, SI, at least superficially, seems to be a focus
of current European policy (see e.g., https://ec.europa.eu/
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Hewitt et al. Social Innovation in Community Energy
FIGURE 1 | Renewable energy as a percentage of total final energy (Top) and 2020 targets (Bottom).
growth/industry/innovation/policy/social_en). Despite this
apparent enthusiasm, it is unclear what, if anything, European
governments are doing to promote the transformation of
ownership, control and civil society participation in energy that
recent definitions of SI clearly imply. By unpicking these recent
definitions and applying them to CE examples uncovered by our
survey (RO 1), we hope to shed light on these questions.
METHODS
To address the ROs defined above, we followed a stepwise
methodology comprising 3 key stages:
1. Literature review of key themes around the social dimension
of CE. Our review was intended to be exploratory rather
than exhaustive. We did not seek to systematically identify
all relevant literature, rather we aimed to characterize key
tendencies chronologically and demonstrate how our interest
in SI relates to the emerging interest in the social dimension
of energy.
2. Internet search and mapping exercise of CE initiatives in 8
countries across the European continent (RO1), comprising
Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and
the United Kingdom. Though the survey presented does not
claim to be comprehensive, its broad scope means that it is
likely to be representative of CE in Europe generally. Case
study countries were chosen with the aim of providing as
diverse a sample as possible of different European approaches
to energy taking in a broad range of energy types, energy
dependencies, institutional forms, and social, and political
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Hewitt et al. Social Innovation in Community Energy
cultures. Our study area thus includes Europe’s largest
economies (Germany, United Kingdom, France, and Italy) in
the heart of Europe, and countries on its southern, northern
and eastern borders. The study encompasses countries with
traditionally very high external energy dependence (Italy,
Belgium and Spain), carbon-intensive economies whose
external energy dependence is increasing from historically
low levels (Poland, Germany, and the United Kingdom) and
countries whose energy dependence is decreasing (France,
Sweden). In terms of energy, we include countries with high
capacity in solar (Germany, Spain, Italy), wind (Germany, UK,
Spain) and Hydropower (Sweden, France, Italy) and countries
where renewables are in general less developed (Poland).
We include strongly nuclear energy-dependent countries like
the UK and France (and increasingly, Sweden) as well as
denuclearizing Germany and countries where nuclear power
is historically small and unpopular (Spain) or not present at
all (Poland). We include “large state” countries like Germany,
Sweden and the UK, where governance is highly centralized,
and countries where governance is highly devolved to regions
and municipalities (Italy, Spain). Both East Germany and
Poland are former command economies, where the legacy of
communism has left deep roots in civil society.
Data were compiled by individual team members with specific
expertise in the chosen case study countries from a wide range
of published and unpublished sources to produce a database
of initiatives. These were mapped by a dedicated cartographer,
and cross-checked by the lead author, who then returned to
the team to request additions and amendments during the
analysis stage (3; below).
The work is exploratory in nature, and we have therefore
tried to let a picture emerge from the data rather than
imposing a top-down blueprint of what CE is or should be.
Our search thus includes any energy-related initiative that is
small-scale or emanating from non-conventional institutional
forms of generation and supply, whether it is citizen, local
government, small business, NGO-led, or some combination
of these, provided that it involves some degree of citizen
control or participation. Our initial conceptualization of CE
is thus closer to the very broad definition of Magnani and
Osti (2016) as “a variety of experiences of renewable energy
development and provision characterized by various degrees
of public participation in project development” than that of
Walker and Devine-Wright (2008) or Seyfang et al. (2013)
who emphasize strong and meaningful local involvement
and control. By casting the net wide, we seek to obtain a
representative picture of what CE is, rather than what it ideally
should be.
3. Analysis and discussion of results from stage 2, in the light
of literature identified in stage 1. Following the definitions
given earlier, (e.g., MacCallum et al., 2009; Cajaiba-Santana,
2014) 4 key criteria can be identified as instrumental for
recognizing social innovation: (1) Crises and opportunities;
(2) the agency of civil society; (3) reconfiguration of social
practices, institutions and networks; (4) new ways of working
that successfully emerge from such a reconfiguration. To
address RO2, we apply these 4 SI criteria as a framework for
analysis of the CE phenomenon in our case study countries.
In the final part of this paper, we discuss the lessons learnt from
the results obtained, and offer some hypotheses and questions for
future research in SI and CE.
LITERATURE REVIEW OF KEY THEMES
Community Energy
CE is found in diverse legal, organizational and financial
forms (Walker, 2008; Rae and Bradley, 2012; Holstenkamp,
2018), and may involve participation in project development
(process), and/or sharing collective benefits (outcomes) (Walker
and Devine-Wright, 2008). CE initiatives may comprise
communities of place—emphasizing shared values associated
with a particular territory or landscape—or communities of
practice—emphasizing shared ethics and world views, financial
circumstances or problems (Magnani and Osti, 2016; but see
also Becker and Kunze, 2014) Energy cooperatives (REScoops)
are the oldest, and perhaps best known, type of CE; these may
be either energy producers, suppliers, or both (Capellán-Pérez
et al., 2016; Magnani and Osti, 2016), and provide energy or
revenue from sales to their members, who are not necessarily
part of the same geographical community. Other types of
initiatives include community development companies or
not-for-profit organizations who manage production or supply
for direct local benefit (Slee and Harnmeijer, 2017; Harnmeijer
et al., 2018), and sustainability movements of various sorts
ranging from substantial and well-organized transition towns
initiatives (Seyfang and Haxeltine, 2012) to eco-villages and
informal citizen’s groups emphasizing self-sufficiency and energy
saving (Georg, 1999; Zhu et al., 2015; Renau, 2018). However,
as Creamer et al. (2018) have observed, CE refers to a broad
spectrum of energy-related initiatives, not a specific class of
project. Though often considered to be sustainable, democratic,
decentralized, grassroots, cooperative and local, many CE
projects may address only one of these aspects. In fact, engaging
with such a complex emerging phenomenon is a non-trivial
task, which the energy research community is just beginning
to address.
Social Innovation in Community Energy
The social dimension of renewable energy has a large and
growing literature (Table A1), which has traditionally been
strongly dominated by UK based researchers and case studies,
though this is now beginning to change (see e.g., Pepermans
and Loots, 2013; Becker and Kunze, 2014; Magnani and Osti,
2016; Bauwens and Defourny, 2017; Szulecki, 2018 etc.). As a
separate research strand, it has its roots in research around the
social acceptance of large energy projects like wind farms. These
were extensively deployed in a centralized fashion across most
of Europe during the 1990s usually with minimal consultation
or meaningful citizen participation, in many cases leading to
rejection by local people (see e.g., Wolsink, 1994, 2000; Devine-
Wright, 2005; Aitken, 2010). Unsurprisingly, several studies have
found that where benefits accrue to the community as a whole,
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Hewitt et al. Social Innovation in Community Energy
public acceptance is likely to be greater (Rogers et al., 2008;
Warren and McFadyen, 2010).
Maruyama et al. (2007), in a study of community participation
in wind energy schemes in Japan, employ the term social
innovation to refer to a new system of social dynamics which
changes the rules of risk–benefit distribution and the role of
social actors around a new technology, in this case, wind energy.
While the Japanese wind energy cooperatives explored in this
paper were investment opportunities, rather than locally based
development ventures, they also served as hubs for uniting
like-minded people around a public goods issue (protecting
the environment). Thus the potential dilution of place and
community identity in these schemes is compensated for by the
strengthening of networks around shared environmental values.
While Walker et al. (2007) regard the emergence of
“community-based localism” around renewable energy in the
UK in the early and mid-2000s as a positive development, they
also caution that the often loose definitions of community,
e.g., as a group of buildings or a legal entity with a not-
for-profit status, do not necessarily imply “participation,
empowerment or wider civic outcome” (Hoffman and
High-Pippert, 2005; Walker et al., 2007). Van der Horst
(2008) provides a broadly contemporary study of CE, which
he refers to as social enterprise in renewable energy. The
emergence of this phenomenon in the UK is attributed by
this author to the slow progress of the private sector in
developing renewable energy, together with the opportunities
that it provided to support rural communities at risk of
fuel poverty due to their remote locations, especially in
Scotland. Other authors concur that Scotland has been a
significant focus of CE innovation, effectively using CE as
a tool for rural development (Slee and Harnmeijer, 2017;
van Veelen, 2017).
The enormous growth in CE in the UK at this time is
evidenced by a series of detailed case studies of individual CE
projects (Hargreaves et al., 2013; Seyfang et al., 2013, 2014;
Grassroots Innovations, 2018). In this research, CE initiatives are
revealed as a patchwork of grassroots movements of extremely
diverse kinds, not easily reducible to a single model entity
or process, and likely not amenable to one-size-fits-all policy
solutions (Rae and Bradley, 2012; Seyfang et al., 2013). This
pluralistic nature of CE has given rise to debate in the academic
literature (e.g., van Veelen, 2017) over the relevance of dominant
transitions research approaches like the multi-level perspective
(Geels, 2002) and the related theory of socio-technical niches
(e.g., Kemp et al., 1998). These approaches have been criticized
for their tendency to treat community energy as a homogenous
phenomenon (e.g., Seyfang et al., 2014, but see also Geels, 2011).
A more serious shortcoming, perhaps, is their evident debt
to “the traditional, technology-focused application of the term
‘innovation”’ (MacCallum et al., 2009), which seems poorly-
aligned with the emerging emphasis on human agency and social
capital that the concept of SI seeks to emphasize.
The role of social capital is examined by Bauwens and
Defourny (2017), in their study of renewable energy cooperatives
in Belgium. They consider three different forms of social
capital: social identification with the cooperative, generalized
interpersonal trust and network structure, and conclude that
while moving toward a mutual benefit model, focusing on
meeting member’s needs, e.g., by supplying green electricity, may
allow community energy organizations to increase their size,
impact and financial stability, social capital may become diluted
as a result.
Becker et al. (2017) examine community energy through
the lens of social entrepreneurship, in order to develop an
integrated approach for analysis of small-scale and bottom-up
energy initiatives using a tripartite framework oriented around
“the purpose of the initiative, its form of organization and
ownership, and its embeddedness into local community or wider
social movements” (Becker et al., 2017). Hiteva and Sovacool
(2017) examine SI in energy service companies (ESCOs) from the
perspective of energy justice, defined as “as a global energy system
that fairly disseminates both the benefits and costs of energy
services” (Hiteva and Sovacool, 2017). They find that established
firms who try to incorporate principles of energy justice into their
business models may deliver these goals less successfully than
companies, like the UK-based Robin Hood Energy, that have
been created for that purpose.
A related term is “energy democracy” which originated in
an important study of a range of European CE initiatives
(Kunze and Becker, 2014). Energy democracy is attributed by
these authors to the climate justice movement, and defined as
ensuring access to energy for all, producing it without harm
to the environment or climate, democratization of the means
of energy production and rethinking our attitude to energy
consumption. Szulecki (2018) notes that, seen as a policy goal
or an ideal socio-technical arrangement, energy democracy is a
“quasi-utopian idealization,” but suggests that key elements of
the energy democracy ideal can be operationalized for policy
purposes. The three elements he selects: democratic popular
sovereignty, participatory governance, and civic ownership,
are recurring themes in CE, and, as we discuss later on
(see: Analysis and Discussion of Results from Survey and
Literature Review), are also key to our own conceptualization
of SI.
SEARCH AND MAPPING EXERCISE OF CE
IN 8 EUROPEAN COUNTRIES
Figures 2–9show CE initiatives for the 8 case study countries
compiled from diverse sources. A list of key literature for each
country is provided in Supplementary Material 1. A summary of
the main CE developments in each case study country is given in
Supplementary Material 2. Full lists of CE initiatives identified
can be consulted in Supplementary Materials 3–10, these are
referred to in the text below. Information was compiled on 2
key levels; CE type (wind, solar, biomass etc., or other – i.e., an
organization dedicated to energy supply, rather than generation)
and organization type (the legal name in the home language, as
well as its approximate rendering in English). Estimated total
numbers of CE initiatives for each case study country, and
the sources from which these figures are derived, are shown
in Table 1.
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Hewitt et al. Social Innovation in Community Energy
FIGURE 4 | CE in Germany.
Energy Type
In terms of energy type, as would be expected, the distribution
broadly reflects the geographical characteristics, for example,
differing potential for wind and solar, of the countries themselves.
In Sweden, wind energy dominates, with a small number of
solar PV projects in the south; in the UK, most large solar
installations are located in the south of the country, with wind
and hydro dominating elsewhere (especially in Scotland, where
wind conditions are generally good); and in Spain and Italy, solar
PV installations are dominant nearly everywhere. The clearest
exception to this general tendency is Germany’s huge solar power
capacity, reflected in CE just as in RE in Germany generally.
Of the 973 renewable energy service cooperatives (REScoops)
identified by Bauwens et al. (2016), only 82 were dedicated to
wind energy, the remainder mostly being solar cooperatives (e.g.,
GE 8, 17, 48). This seems to be because of the higher returns
from solar energy, together with the preference for the limited
partnership model (GmbH & Co. KG) for community wind
projects (Bauwens et al., 2016). In general, the chronological
development of wind and solar schemes reflects the pattern of
RE development as a whole, with community wind schemes
emerging mostly in the 1990s (e.g., UK 48, SW 14), and solar
cooperatives a decade later (Holstenkamp and Ulbrich, 2010;
Oteman et al., 2014, note only 4 solar cooperatives in Germany
in 2007, rising to over 200 by 2010, this pattern is reflected in
the UK and Sweden). Spain is an interesting exception to this
rule. While the country is quite typical in terms of chronological
development of RE generally, with the wind power boom of the
1990s followed by a solar PV boom in the mid-late 2000s (Alonso
et al., 2016), the first community wind turbine at Pujalt near
Barcelona (SP 14) became operational only in summer 2018, long
after the crowd-funded solar projects at Mercado del Carmel in
2007 (SP16) and Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in 2009 (SP
18). This is likely to be because the capital investment required for
small rooftop solar arrays like SP16 and 18 is much smaller than
for a wind turbine like SP14, and Spain still lacks a supportive
policy environment to manage these risks (Hewitt et al., 2017).
In Italy, community hydro schemes dating back to the turn
of the twentieth century are to be found in the northern regions
of Trentino and South Tyrol (e.g., IT1; IT7), reflecting the
historic importance of the Alps for hydroelectricity. Elsewhere,
community hydro schemes are less common, and quite different
in nature than these Italian customer-owned hydro electricity
utilities (Mori, 2013). Anafon Hydro in Wales (UK 40) and
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Hewitt et al. Social Innovation in Community Energy
FIGURE 7 | CE in Spain.
BürgerEnergie Lübeck (GE 53) are good examples, there are
others in France and Sweden (Energy Archipelago, 2018). In
the UK at least, where many community hydro schemes are
found, our searches identified 3 such schemes that failed to
get past the planning stage (e.g., UK 18). The reasons behind
this are unclear (though see Hielscher, 2012) and may warrant
further investigation.
Bioenergy, which is widespread in Europe, is generally less
well-represented in the CE literature, perhaps because schemes
are often centrally controlled, either by a public body or a large
energy company, or under individual ownership (e.g., on-farm),
rather than community enterprises. In the UK, biomass CE
initiatives are generally small-scale, e.g., for heating community
centers and churches (e.g., UK 57). There are a small number
of biogas schemes in France, e.g., Méthadoux, near La Rochelle
(FR 51), which bring together local livestock farmers to produce
energy through a limited liability company (SAS). In Italy,
community bioenergy projects are not clearly in evidence, the
biogas company So.ge.nu.s Spa (IT18) seems to be a consortium
of municipalities and is not noticeably citizen-controlled. In
Spain, the pioneering cooperative Somenergia (SP2) produces
electricity for its members from an anaerobic digester at
Torregrossa, Lleida. In both Poland and Belgium, government
support schemes for green energy have favored large scale
incumbent providers, who have adapted by burning biomass
in coal-fired plants [Bauwens et al., 2016; International Energy
Agency (IEA), 2017], rather than CE initiatives. In Sweden,
despite major restructuring of the District Heating market, which
is largely dependent on biomass (from 95% municipal owned in
the late 1980s to 51% sole municipal ownership in 2014), there is
little evidence of participative community involvement beyond a
handful of cooperatives (Magnusson, 2016). However, as in the
French case, there are some small limited companies set up by
groups of farmers, like Farmarenergi i Eslöv AB (e.g., SW 55),
which provides heating for local homes.
In Germany, however, community bioenergy plays a
significant role in the form of “bioenergy villages” (e.g., GE
59). The number of such villages, which produce electricity and
supply local heating needs by burning food and animal waste
in combined heat and power plants, has increased enormously
since the first was established at Jühnde, in Göttingen, in 2000
(Wüste and Schmuck, 2012). Today (September 2018), they are
found all over Germany; the Agency for Renewable Resources
(FNR) lists 147 bioenergy villages, and another 44 “on the way”
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Hewitt et al. Social Innovation in Community Energy
(FNR, 2018). Though bionenergy villages are strongly promoted
at regional government level, with, for example, the state of
Baden-Wurttemberg offering to fund the development of 100
bioenergy villages by 2020 (Wüste and Schmuck, 2012), Boch
und Polach et al. (2015) have suggested that social capital and
trust among key stakeholders, as well a strong local initiator, are
key factors in success or failure of initiatives.
Finally, there are a wide range of initiatives where energy type
is denoted as “other”; these include initiatives dedicated to supply
of energy or energy-related services rather than generation (e.g.,
SP 7,8) or to broader considerations like carbon-reduction, fuel
poverty goals or “transitioning” society to more equitable and
sustainable pathways (e.g., UK 4,5, SP 19).
Organizational Type
REScoops
In terms of organization type, Renewable Energy Cooperatives
(REScoops) of various forms are by far the most common class
of CE. These have broadly comparable legal forms in most
countries, e.g., Ekonomiska förening (Sweden), Industrial and
Provident Societies (UK) or Energiegenossenschaften (Germany).
Most such cooperatives are old, though reorganizations of their
legal structure in many countries since the 1980s, e.g., in Italy,
Spain and the UK, have allowed elements of social enterprise
to be introduced in response to a growing need for third sector
involvement in multiple areas of activity (Borzaga and Defourny,
2001). The limited presence of REScoops in some countries, is
often related to difficulties of the cooperative form, e.g., in Spain,
cooperatives could not market electricity before 2010 (Romero-
Rubio and de Andrés Díaz, 2015). In Germany, most of the
large number of REScoops (>1,000, see Table 1) are nowadays
dedicated to producing solar energy. This is because wind farm
projects have mostly adopted the GmbH & Co. KG model, where
voting rights depend on the proportion of capital invested, not
on the traditional “one member, one vote” cooperative principle
(Bauwens et al., 2016).
All of these cooperatives in their respective countries serve
to allow their members to carry out economic activity through
energy generation or supply. Some own energy infrastructures,
or shares in them, e.g., hydropower plants, wind turbines or
solar farms, others act only, or mainly, as resellers of energy
from renewable sources. Some provide energy to members or
local people directly (e.g., UK 59) but most sell electricity to the
market and pay dividends to their members (e.g., SW7, UK13,
GE29). In Spain, REScoops mostly act as resellers of energy to
their members (SP14 is a notable exception), using energy source
accreditation schemes to guarantee 100% renewable energy.
However, Som Energia (SP2), the largest and oldest of the Spanish
REScoops, does own some RE plants, and recently became the
first developer to build a solar PV plant without any form of
subsidy (Rodríguez Íñigo, 2015). In Italy, in addition to offering
members returns on their investments, REScoops also may offer
additional benefits, such as payments to citizens who provide
assets like rooftops (e.g., Retenergie, IT 3), royalties or rents to
the municipality, or discounts on energy bills (Candelise and
Ruggieri, 2017).
In Poland, there is just one officially-registered energy
cooperative (Nasza Energia, PO 1). However, this seems to be an
initiative arising from the business sector, rather than a bona fide
citizens’ movement (Rabiega, 2018; telephone interview). One
possible reason for the lack of energy cooperatives in Poland
may be that the cooperative model is negatively associated in
the minds of citizens with the state socialism promoted by the
communist regimes before 1990 (Beckmann et al., 2015).
Community Development Trusts
In the UK, most notably, but not exclusively, in Scotland,
development trusts or community benefit companies are
prominent. Community Development Trusts (CDTs) and
Community Interest Companies (CICs) (e.g., UK 6,7,17, 36)
are typically Private Limited Companies without share capital,
whereas Community Benefit Societies (CBCs) are usually
Registered Societies (the UK legal form of a cooperative). Both
of these are managed by a board of community representatives,
returning income to the community as a whole, rather than
just investors.
These UK organizational forms have received recent attention
from Harnmeijer et al. (2018), who compare and contrast
organizational structures of CE initiatives in different parts of the
UK (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland). They note
that while CE initiatives are often thought of as egalitarian by
nature, some organizational structures are more egalitarian than
others. Some cooperatives may be less egalitarian than CDTs,
in the sense that the cooperative structure relies on delivering
return to individual investors rather than investing in projects
for the whole community, like CDTs and CICs (Harnmeijer et al.,
2018). This distinction is comparable to the “public versus mutual
benefit” dichotomy identified by Bauwens and Defourny (2017)
in their analysis of energy cooperatives in Belgium.
Local Government Projects With Citizen Participation
In France, where energy has traditionally been highly centralized,
the Pluriannual energy program (PEP) adopted in 2016
(Ministère de la Transition écologique et solidaire, 2016)
has sought to increase citizen participation in energy by
prioritizing installations funded through citizen share offers.
These “crowdfunded” developments are normally initiated by
municipalities, who initially own the capital and then open the
project to local citizen participation (Christen and Hamman,
2015). This was the case, for example, of a wind farm comprising
10 turbines installed across 6 communes (municipalities) in the
department of Vosges et Bas-Rhin). In this 2008 pilot project
managed by the specialist company Énergie Partagée, who help
with capital financing and manage risk, the municipality first
owned 40% of the shares and then opened up the remaining 60%
to citizens (Christen and Hamman, 2015, 127).
Thus, in France, and also in Italy, local government, which is
highly autonomous, compared with the UK, is a key driver of
CE projects. In France, as we have seen, municipalities are key
project initiators, while in Italy they may provide supportive local
policy frameworks or assets like the rooftops of public buildings
(Candelise and Ruggieri, 2017). In Spain, the tendency is less
clear, probably because community energy generation initiatives
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Hewitt et al. Social Innovation in Community Energy
TABLE 1 | Numbers of CE initiatives mapped by this study, and estimated total numbers of CE initiatives from literature.
Country CE initiatives
mapped in this
study
Estimated total no. of CE
initiatives
Sources Internal reference
Belgium 21 34 (23 cooperatives and 11 local
citizens’ organizations1)
1. Bauwens et al., 2016 Supplementary Material 3,Figure 2
France 70 >7011. This study. This number may be far greater,
since our study did not aim to identify all CE
projects
Supplementary Material 4,Figure 3
Germany 60 >1171
>1024 coops)1>147 bioenergy
villages2
1. Kahla et al. (2017) estimate 1024 in 2016,
Kalkbrenner and Roosen (2016) estimate
>970 a year earlier. The number is certainly
greater since this estimate included only
registered cooperatives, not other forms of CE.
2. FNR (2018), this number will grow, since
more are developing according to this source.
Supplementary Material 5,Figure 4
Italy 23 34
(141+202)
1. Candelise and Ruggieri (2017)
2. This study. 23 initiatives identified, 3 of which
(IT 4,13,20) already identified by source 1.
Supplementary Material 6,Figure 5
Poland 34 341(1 cooperative, 33 “energy
clusters”)
1. This study. Supplementary Material 7,Figure 6
Spain 20 31(17 coops and 1 second level
coop1; 13 other initiatives2)
1. Unión Renovables Coop (2018)
2. This study. These 13 initiatives are SP1,
3-6, 12-19
Supplementary Material 8,Figure 7
Sweden 69 1121
(81 wind coops, 6 solar PV
coops, 25 eco-villages)
1. Kooij et al. (2018) Supplementary Material 9,Figure 8
United Kingdom 62 431
(137 England, Wales, NI1294
Scotland2)
1. Community Energy England (2017)
2. Community Energy Scotland (2018)
3. Usmani (2017).
Supplementary Material 10,Figure 9
are less common. However, Noáin municipality, near Pamplona
(SP 3, is one such example, and Viladecans (Vilawatt, SP 19),
in Barcelona, is another. Both of these initiatives are strongly
focused around energy efficiency measures, in the case of Noáin,
the primary motivation cited is climate change, while the Vilawatt
initiative in Viladecans looks to reduce citizen’s energy bills and
end dependence on large energy companies (Bessete, 2018). The
Cadiz energy transition roundtable (SP 5) is clearly promoted by
the town council.
In this context, the newly emerging Polish “energy clusters”
are relevant (PO 2-34). One of the main reasons hampering
the development of the CE in Poland has been the lack
of regulations determining the legal form of such initiatives.
However, while the legal form of an (energy) cooperative does
formally exist in Poland, the government has introduced and
intensively promoted a different concept, namely the energy
clusters (klastry energii). Energy clusters are defined as a contract
between various actors (individuals, legal persons, business
entities, research entities, and local municipalities), for the
purpose of energy generation, balancing, trade or distribution.
However, legislation also specifies that the energy used by clusters
is not necessarily limited to renewables (Sejm, 2015). In order
to hold the formal title of “energy cluster” such initiatives must
obtain government approval (so far 33 such initiatives have
done so). Having the officially recognized label increases the
chances of receiving external funding, e.g., from the National
Fund for Environmental Protection and Water Management.
Most energy clusters seem to have been established either by
the local authorities or the business sector, with a small rate of
citizens’ participation. However, despite these clear limitations
and early stage of their development, energy clusters can be seen
as a positive development within Poland’s highly centralized,
coal-based energy tradition, representing a cautious move toward
a low carbon-economy and energy decentralization.
Public-Private Partnerships
Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are a key feature of CE in
many countries. In France, companies like Énergie Partagée
and Enercoop, which emerged during the liberalization of the
energy market after the year 2000, help finance municipal-
driven projects with citizen share offers. This serves to mitigate
the financial risk to the municipalities that initiate the project.
However, while PPPs are often seen as an ideal way to
combine market efficiencies with public interest, they are not
necessarily always inclusive, and public-participation “needs to
be designed in, not assumed-in” (Lowndes and Sullivan, 2004).
For this reason, the Vilawatt project (SP19) has established
a public-private-citizen partnership (PPCP) to ensure citizen
representation alongside private companies and public entities.
Private Companies
Often, while energy installations may be owned by cooperatives,
electricity generation is carried out by a private company,
either a separate commercial entity like Dala Vind AB (SW
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Hewitt et al. Social Innovation in Community Energy
7) or a wholly-owned trading arm of the cooperative or trust,
like Makassar, which runs the Torregrassa biogas plant for
Somenergia (SP2), or the Udny Wind Turbine Company (UK 6).
Often, where electricity generation is the sole or main objective
of the scheme, such as in farmers’ biogas collectives (e.g., FR51
and SW55), a private limited company is the preferred option.
While literature often focusses on the supposed altruistic nature
of CE schemes, and thus may exclude “for profit” organizations,
this risks missing the point of many such projects—to make
money for local people. In fact, one of the prime motivators
of such schemes is the realization by local actors that RE
subsidy mechanisms like Feed-in-Tariffs (FiTs) can be accessed
by the communities themselves through the same structures (i.e.,
companies) used by larger operators. However, small companies
may often find themselves at a considerable disadvantage when
compared to larger, established energy companies. In Germany,
for example, while legislation (EEG, 2017) aims to achieve a high
diversity of actors in the energy transition, in practice, significant
barriers remain for smaller organizations. These barriers relate
to institutional and policy designs conceived for large energy
suppliers, like taxes and grid access costs that are excessive for
smaller organizations, and reporting requirements designed for
the big energy industry (Oppen et al., 2017).
Other Grassroots Initiatives
Also very widespread, but less easily classifiable, is a broad range
of local initiatives, prominently the eco-villages of Sweden (e.g.,
SW 63; Magnusson, 2018), occupied villages like Lakabe, in the
Spanish Pyrenees (SP 12), projects allied to the transition towns
movement (e.g., UK 20), and the citizens’ energy “platforms”
like the (unsuccessful) Berlin Energy Round Table (Becker
et al., 2017) and other initiatives like those that have recently
(after 2012) begun to emerge in Spain (SP 1, 5, 6). The
organizational form is less relevant in these cases, being largely
a matter of convenience, if it exists at all. These grassroots
movements in CE are mainly oriented around two key themes,
(1) sustainability and environmental issues, often from an anti-
consumerist perspective; (2) energy democracy and fuel poverty.
Though in practice these social movements are often allied, they
respond to different crises, an ecological crisis in the former
case, provoked by climate change, and societal failure to act, and
a socio-political crisis in the latter, arising from the failure of
governments and markets to meet citizens’ energy needs in an
equitable way (see Discussion).
ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION OF RESULTS
FROM SURVEY AND LITERATURE REVIEW
Social Innovation in European
Community Energy
CE is discussed in the light of the four key criteria we identified
earlier for evaluation of the SI concept as follows:
Crises and Opportunities
To be able to recognize an innovation, we need an historical
timepoint that serves as a clear benchmark for change from the
earlier systems or procedures of that time to the later systems or
procedures that we may characterize as innovative. The origins
of CE have been attributed by various authors to the social and
environmental and movements emerging in Europe in the 1960s
and the “oil shocks” of the early 1970s (e.g., Cowtan, 2017; Kooij
et al., 2018). However, while this explains the development of
renewable energy generally and the growing awareness of citizens
around energy issues, it does not explain the reason for the
sudden increase in CE initiatives after 1990, or the subsequent,
more recent waves of development up to the present day. These
are summarized in Table 2 and Figure 10.
Firstly, the timeline (Table 2) clearly shows that CE, at least
in its mainstream sense of REScoops providing generation and
supply services, is clearly linked to the availability of appropriate
organizational forms and policy instruments. In Germany and
Sweden, for example, REScoops were not so much alternative
vehicles for communities to democratize energy, but pioneering
initiatives that drove the development of mainstream wind power
in the early 1990s (Enzensberger et al., 2003; Wizelius, 2018). In
these countries, when wind power began to take on importance,
developers reached for models to permit the financing of these
risky enterprises, and cooperatives fitted the bill at that time.
This was not the case elsewhere, where cooperative structures
did not (or could not) occupy this crucial niche. In Spain
and Italy, for example, massive expansion of wind power took
place from the early 1990s (Bilgili et al., 2011; Ramírez et al.,
2018), yet REScoops were not involved in this process at all.
Instead, this niche was occupied by companies like EHN (later
Acciona) and IVPC (International Energy Agency (IEA), 2001).
In the UK, the first commercial wind farm was developed
in 1991, yet no CE wind power scheme emerged until 1997
(Cowtan, 2017).
The key role of incentives as enablers for CE schemes is
also clear from Table 2. In Sweden, France, Italy and Germany,
CE projects did not emerge in significant numbers until public
subsidies like FiTs became available. After a slow start, CE
also took off in the UK after 2010 exactly coinciding with
the introduction of FiT and RHI (Renewable Heat Incentive)
subsidy schemes. The reverse is also true. In in Germany,
gradual reduction of FiTs for solar PV installations in 2012 (Baur
and Uriona, 2018) led to a reduction in the growth of new
PV cooperatives, likewise in Italy, where growth slowed after
PV schemes became ineligible for the FiT scheme (Candelise
and Ruggieri, 2017). In the UK, government reductions in
FiT payments and changes to eligibility criteria in 2014
led to a noticeable reduction in CE initiatives since then,
despite the otherwise strong institutional support framework
(Cowtan, 2017).
A number of other clear factors emerge as highly important.
If FiTs paved the way for the first wave of CE initiatives
in northern Europe, the EU directive on liberalization of the
electricity market (applied to all consumers by 2004) seems
to have been a key factor in allowing CE initiatives to enter
the market (Kooij et al., 2018). In Scotland which has seen
much stronger growth in CE than elsewhere in the UK
(Harnmeijer et al., 2018), a community development body
(Highlands and Islands Community Energy Company; HICEC,
later Community Energy Scotland) established in 2004, was able
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Hewitt et al. Social Innovation in Community Energy
TABLE 2 | Timeline of main developments in CE.
Country Initial
developments
Notes Expansion
phase
Notes Deceleration
phase
Notes
Belgium 1991 Ecopower established 2013 Formation of Cociter, new legal
support in Wallonia, formation of
federations (Bauwens et al., 2016)
NA
France 2001 FiT introduced; first wind coops
established
2016 Increase in new projects NA
Germany 1990 FiT introduced; first wind coops
established
2005 Boom in solar coops begins 2014 Boom in solar coops ends
Italy 2008 FiT introduced; first REScoops
established
2011 New coops open, Reterengie
expands
2013 FiTs closed to solar PV, boom in
REScoops ends
Poland 2014 Government studies legal forms
of coops (visits to Germany)
2016 Energy clusters initiative launched NA The Polish government is currently
conducting a second round of the
“contest” to award locally based
initiatives with the “energy cluster”
label
Spain 2010 Coops permitted to market
electricity; Som Energia
established
2010 Further coops established, but no
boom
NA
Sweden 1990 First wind coop established (Näs,
Gotland); subsidies for biomass
combined heat and power, wind
power, and solar heating in 1991
(Kooij et al., 2018)
2003 The green electricity certificate system
(2003) Boom in wind coops begins
2015 Boom in wind coops ends
UK 1997 First wind coop established
(Baywind)
2010 FiT and Renewable Heat Incentive
(RHI) introduced
2015 Government modifies FiTs and
changes eligibility, CE boom ends
FIGURE 10 | Development trajectory of CE in case study countries, showing crises and opportunities (Right) and SI phases (Left).
to take full advantage of the rapidly changing policy scenario by
making the crucial link between community development and
renewable energy. The Community Development Trust model
(see section Community Development Trusts, above) was thus
an opportunistic phenomenon arising out of a particular set of
circumstances that were probably unique to Scotland at that time.
However, uptake of renewables by the private sector had been
generally disappointing UK-wide, thus the failure of the private
developer-led model also provided an opportunity (that might
not otherwise have been available) to try something new (Van der
Horst, 2008).
The local social context in different European countries, or
between regions within individual countries, is also key. Without
social capital (following Bauwens and Defourny, 2017, see above),
or a culture of local participation, CE cannot easily emerge.
The distrust felt by Polish citizens toward cooperative models
of social organization is clearly a major factor in the absence of
REScoops in Poland, and probably also explains the low level
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Hewitt et al. Social Innovation in Community Energy
of development in the former GDR areas of Germany (Bauwens
et al., 2016). Perhaps a CE model emphasizing local enterprise
rather than cooperative values might be more successful in
these areas.
More recently, the growth of CE initiatives in many countries
has been strongly influenced by the global financial crisis
and subsequent recession that began in 2007 and continue to
have grave consequences across Europe. This “Great Recession,”
known in many European countries simply as “the crisis,”
arguably has had much more direct, consequential and long-
lasting impact on the individual European citizen than the 1970s
oil shocks. Nevertheless, the two events are clearly related, and in
energy terms, the earlier event is a clear precursor to the later. The
oil shocks showed clearly the power of the global energy giants to
the ordinary citizen, perhaps for the first time (Mitchell, 2011).
In a similar way, the sharp upsurge in interest shown by citizens
in issues relating to control and supply of energy, especially as
a means to decrease their household expenditure on energy, is
certainly related to this more recent crisis. In Southern Europe,
where the effects of the crisis were more strongly felt than in the
more diversified economies of the North (e.g., Germany, France,
UK), this can be clearly demonstrated. In Spain, the crisis has
clearly been as a key factor in driving the emergence of the supply
REScoops like Som Energia (SP2) (Capellán-Pérez et al., 2018;
Heras-Saizarbitoria et al., 2018). To give another example, the
Cadiz energy transition roundtable (SP 5), can trace a direct
lineage from the anti-austerity social movements of 15th May
2011 (15M), to the formation of the anti-austerity party Podemos
in 2014 to the electoral success of that party and associated
grassroots movements in the local government elections of 2015,
in which they took control of the city. The ongoing movement for
energy transition in Spain is directly emergent from grassroots
activism around austerity in the context of the Great Recession.
In summary then, European CE is an artifact of a
range of different crises and opportunities, beginning with
the social and environmental movements of the 1960s and
70s and the “oil shocks.” These can be broadly structured
around three main phases of SI (Table 3). In Phase I,
social and technological experiments laid the groundwork for
the mainstream development of renewables in countries like
Germany and Sweden, where, along with Denmark, the earliest
of the energy cooperatives were formed. The process was
facilitated by a range of policy instruments like FiTs and
market liberalization which CE was able to take advantage of.
Mainstream development of CE thus followed in the mid-2000s
(Phase II), but it was not until the economic crisis in 2007–
8 that social conditions were ripe for emergence of grassroots
initiatives in Southern Europe to challenge the dominance of
the big energy companies (Phase III). Neither France nor the
UK were as severely affected by the crisis as Italy and Spain.
Nevertheless, it is probable that this has led to a gradual erosion
of acceptance of large developer-led schemes in the context of
generally rising energy prices, which has facilitated the more
recent emergence of CE schemes in these countries also. In the
UK, especially in Scotland, CE is seen as a key facilitator of
community development.
The Agency of Civil Society
Analysis of the extent to which CE initiatives are driven by
civil society, as opposed to governments or private entities
is a useful determinant of SI in this domain, since energy
systems are traditionally centralized and non-participative.
However, despite the large number of potentially applicable
frameworks and methods, of which Arnstein’s (1969) “ladder
of participation” is perhaps the best known, it can be difficult
to effectively evaluate the degree of civil society participation
in projects. On one hand this is because local-scale governance
structures (e.g., Spanish municipios or French communes) may
sometimes represent civil society at least as successfully as
parallel “unofficial” citizens’ collectives. On the other hand,
the ordinary electoral process may return control of the town
hall to citizens’ collectives, as happened most notably in Spain
in 2015, as in the previously cited example of the city of
Cadiz (SP 5). The problem is also compounded because many
successful initiatives, as we have seen, combine public, private
and citizens’ groups (so called third sector). Despite these
difficulties, some attempt to estimate the degree of civil society
involvement in decision-making (participation) is worthwhile. In
Table 4, we apply a modified form of Arnstein’s (1969) ladder
to European CE initiatives, highlighting some examples from
our study.
The first point to note here, is that, by applying Arnstein’s
framework, the great majority of CE initiatives identified in
our study do clearly involve some degree of citizen power. The
exceptions to this rule are those “cooperatives of convenience”
identified in Belgium, which are effectively subsidiaries of
large energy companies and offer citizens shares, but not
co-ownership of the project, and the various public-private-
partnership schemes where citizens are effectively silent investors
or are represented only by their local politicians, e.g., many of the
French “Énergie Partagée” schemes and (at present) the Polish
energy clusters. These clearly belong at the level of tokenism.
The second point to observe is that beyond this tokenistic
step, a number of CE initiatives progress no further than
Step 6, Partnership, where citizens benefit, but have no real
power over energy generation or supply. These include both
the supply REScoops, who tend to focus mostly on providing
renewable electricity to their members (a public benefit model,
e.g., IT20, BE12, SP2) as well as those that place more emphasis
on generating return on investments to their members, like
the wind cooperatives in Sweden and solar cooperatives in
Germany (a mutual benefit model e.g., BE1, SW46, GE29).
Bauwens and Defourny (2017) have suggested that social capital,
defined as social identification with the cooperative, generalized
interpersonal trust, and network structure, may be weaker in
the former cooperative type than in the latter, and we have thus
separated step 6 into two parts to account for this important
distinction. Clearly, there is a great deal of overlap here, as social
capital seems to be dependent on size, thus large Swedish wind
cooperatives like Dala Vindkraft (SW7) are placed on Step 6a, and
small-scale initiatives like Udny (UK 6) on Step 6b. Clearly, in
the latter case, the place-based nature of the Udny scheme, which
benefits all locals independent of their investment in the projects,
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Hewitt et al. Social Innovation in Community Energy
TABLE 3 | Three waves of social innovation in community energy in Europe.
A crisis or opportunity The agency of civil society Reconfiguration of social
practices, institutions and
networks
New ways of working
Phase I
Community Energy Social
Innovations (1970s-2000)
The 1970s “oil shocks”
First wave of environmentalism,
Renewable energy seen as more
important than energy
democracy.
Share-based participation and
energy autonomy movements.
The citizen as campaigner, rise of
individualism and DIY solutions
to global problems (think global,
act local).
Emergence of small energy
cooperatives, isolationist
(utopian) energy communities
(ecovillages) and off-grid
movements
Phase II
Community Energy Social
Innovations (ca 2000-2008)
State supported drive for
renewables, FiTs, liberalization,
Renewable energy seen as the
key solution, generation seen as
more important than supply.
Cautious state support,
occasional explicit recognition
and support of community (e.g.,
Germany, Scotland).
The citizen as participant,
environmental concerns become
mainstream.
Widespread expansion of
REScoops, especially solar.
Bioenergy villages. Birth of
CE-based community
development (Scotland).
Phase III Community Energy
Social Innovations
(2008-present)
The Great Recession (2007-16)
Crisis of trust in Big Energy and
neoliberal capitalism. Energy
democracy seen as more
important than renewable
energy. Increasing concern with
pricing and supply.
Anti-extractivism, energy justice
and energy democracy
movements. Declining state
support as incumbent actors
begin to feel threatened.
The citizen as leader, rise of
neo-collectivism, New (or
restored) institutional
arrangements,
re-municipalizations, citizen
partnerships and “round tables”
Holistic energy movements,
transition towns, “energy justice”
service companies (e.g., Robin
Hood energy; Hiteva and
Sovacool, 2017). CE as a key
pillar of community development
(Scotland).
is likely to increase social capital under the definition given by
Bauwens and Defourny (2017).
In step 7, the place-based nature of the initiatives becomes
paramount, and their size is generally small and local. In
these examples, the emphasis is shifted entirely to community
benefit, since financial benefit accruing to investors is non-
inclusive in the sense that only wealthier (and often-better
educated) community members can purchase shares. This step
includes wholly owned and self-managed private enterprises,
where everyone is a director and everyone makes the tea, as well
as altruistic not-for-profit projects based around strong networks
of (often unpaid) local participants. Logically, the high level
of control that these initiatives have over their energy systems
implies that most beneficiaries are actively involved in day-to-day
running of the project. Effectively, being in control means doing
a lot of it yourself.
In Step 8, this tendency is taken to its extreme, and here
we find those unusual examples of off-grid communities, where,
usually because of remoteness or inaccessibility, communities
must build, and operate their energy systems without outside
assistance. The motivations for this may be either deliberate
choice, like the inhabitants of Lakabe, in the Spanish Pyrenees (SP
12), who occupied and rebuilt an abandoned village in pursuit
of a way of life more closely connected with nature and self-
sufficiency, or mostly by necessity, as on the island of Eigg,
Scotland (Green Eigg, 2018). Both of these communities are
entirely self-sufficient in terms of energy, but remain connected
to the wider economy. The enormous challenges that such
projects pose mean that these cases are likely to remain in
a minority.
Reconfiguration of Social Practices, Institutions,
and Networks
Firstly, this key aspect of SI implies that a recognizable
change that emerges without such a reconfiguration is not
a social innovation. The recognizable change that is being
proposed by governments and large energy companies to
meet the goals of the Paris Agreement is the large-scale
deployment of renewable energy systems under centralized
business models and market conditions that favor energy
incumbents. This is a technological, not a social, innovation.
These proposals go some way toward appeasing stakeholders
whose predominant concern is the decarbonization of
energy systems, even if progress on this narrowly defined
goal is much too slow (Figure 1). However, in no case
are any mainstream energy commentators proposing a
transition from large scale energy production to small scale
local grid and energy independent communities, mainly
because of the enormous difficulty in achieving buy-in from
powerful incumbents.
It is also clear from our study that institutional form, on its
own, is not a useful criterion for determining what is, and what is
not, a social innovation in CE. A farmers’ bioenergy consortium
(e.g., FR 51, SW 55), may involve more collaboration at the
local scale than a community share offer from a wind farm. Yet
the farmers’ group is likely to be a private company, while the
wind farm may be a wholly owned cooperative. Both, in our
view, fit within the broad definitions of “community energy,”
yet this designation tells us nothing about the nature of the
initiative. Yet when we apply the criterion of “reconfiguration
of social practices, institutions and networks,” we are on firmer
ground. Though the initial reconfiguration of social practices
that a wind farm community share offer entailed was certainly
a valid social innovation in its day (see e.g., Maruyama et al.,
2007), there has been no reconfiguration of a recognizable
kind in most of our case study countries since the initiative
became embedded practice in that country. In 2018, wind
cooperatives are a successful and widespread institutional form
in many countries, e.g., Sweden, Germany and the UK. For this
reason they are no longer social innovations in these countries.
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Hewitt et al. Social Innovation in Community Energy
TABLE 4 | Different levels of participation in CE initiatives in Europe.
Community energy participation
step
Case examples Participation
level
Participation step Notes
RE share offer or RE supply with
minimal or no co-ownership, local
initiatives without real civil society
involvement.
Belgium cases “cooperatives of
convenience” (e.g., Electrabel
Cogreen, Lampiris, Eoly)
Poland Energy Clusters (PO2-34),
France Public-Private-Partnerships,
(e.g., FR20), Comunità Solare, Italy,
with less than 1% citizens’ ownership
(Candelise and Ruggieri, 2017)
Tokenism Step 5: Placation Citizens receive dividend payments
but are not co-owners and hold no
real power
RE share offer or RE supply with
co-ownership. Usually interest-based.
Public benefit oriented (Bauwens and
Defourny, 2017)
Green energy supply coops, e.g.,
Som Energia (SP2), E’Nostra (IT19),
Bath & West Community Energy
(UK22). Larger generation coops,
e.g., Dala Vindkraft Ek. för. (SW7)
Citizen Power Step 6a: Silent
Partnership
Citizens receive dividend payments or
benefit in some other way (e.g., from
100% renewable energy) and are
co-owners of installations but do not
usually play an active role in
management
As above, mutual benefit oriented
(Bauwens and Defourny, 2017).
Interest-based or place-based.
Smaller generation coops or Benefit
companies, e.g., Udny (UK 6),
Beauvent (BE1)
Step 6b: Vocal
Partnership
As above, but citizens feel strong
personal links to the project (social
capital).
As above but citizens are active
participants in management of
project. Usually place-based. 100%
community ownership, may include
community benefit fund.
Farmers’ biogas coops, e.g.,
Farmarenergi i Eslöv AB (SW 55)
Bioenergy villages in Germany (e.g.,
GE 59). Local energy efficiency/saving
initiatives, e.g., Reepham green team
(UK 5), Vilawatt (SP19), other
transition movements.
Step 7: Delegated
Power
As Step 6, but most beneficiaries are
active participants in management or
project development. Citizens have
full ownership of projects and
installations
Wholly owned and self-sufficient
energy generation and supply
Lakabe ecoaldea (SP 12) Step 8: Citizen control Citizens are energy self-sufficient
However, context is essential. In Spain, where systematic barriers
exist that must be overcome by complex negotiations between
actors outside of their “comfort zone,” a community wind
turbine (SP14, Viure de l’aire, 2018) is certainly a recognizable
social innovation.
New Ways of Working
Conversely, with respect to the previous point, a reconfiguration
of social practices, institutions, and networks should result in
significant new ways of working to be identified as a social
innovation. The key point here is that it is not difficult
to identify apparently significant reconfigurations of social
practices, institutions and networks in relation to energy
that don’t, in the end, lead to transformative change. For
example, Magnusson (2016) found that the dramatic changes
of ownership in the DH market in Sweden between the
late 1980s and 2014 had, in the end, no real impact on
consumers, who remained entirely at the margins of this
transformation. The lesson from this example is to question
whether the REScoops, that have proliferated to such an
extent across Europe have really been transformative in terms
of their stated goals, that is, greater citizen participation
in energy and a transition to a low-carbon energy future.
This is not an easy question to answer, and more detailed
analysis of cases would be needed to give a clear response. As
Lowndes and Sullivan (2004) have noted for the case of PPPs,
greater participation of civil society needs to be demonstrated,
not assumed.
Future Pathways: CE as a Road to
Energy Democracy?
Our study suggests that a complete democratization of energy,
such that all energy generation and supply is controlled and
owned by citizens’ groups is not likely to take place in the near
future. However, CE is very widespread across Europe and deeply
embedded, and there are some reasons to be optimistic about its
future as well as some reasons to be less optimistic. Development
models based on external ownership and limited local benefit
have been increasingly challenged in many countries. Energy
generation and supply across Europe is still dominated by just
a handful of multinational companies (Darmani et al., 2016;
Corscadden, 2018), and this is widely recognized as a serious
problem for both energy affordability and the transition to
cleaner energy systems (e.g., Barquin et al., 2006; Boroumand,
2015; Kungl, 2015; Ciarreta et al., 2016; Magnusson, 2016).
While national governments may be unable or unwilling
to contemplate direct intervention, regional and local scale
administrations face no such difficulty, and in Germany, for
example, there has been a concerted drive to bring energy
generation and supply back under local public control through
“re-municipalization” (Wagner and Berlo, 2017). Recent years
have seen a growing Europe-wide trend in favor of bringing
services, including energy, back into municipal control after
decades of outsourcing and privatization (Hall, 2012; Cumbers,
2016). In this context, CE has an important role to play in
diversifying the energy market and more fairly distributing
revenue from energy generation and supply. While mutual
benefit-oriented REScoops like those in Sweden and Germany
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Hewitt et al. Social Innovation in Community Energy
offer significant financial returns to investor-members, the case of
the UK, particularly in Scotland, shows how energy projects can
be used to fund community development directly. The difference
between developer-led and community-led schemes in terms of
direct financial benefit to communities is very notable—the 800
KW community wind turbine at Udny, Aberdeenshire (UK 6)
returns the same benefit to the local community as Vattenfall’s
recently completed 93.2 MW offshore array at Aberdeen Bay–ca
£150,000 in both cases (Local Energy Scotland, 2018; Vattenfall,
2018). The continued unpopularity of these kinds of large
developments, together with the mounting evidence that public
acceptance is likely to be greater where benefits accrue to
the community as a whole (Rogers et al., 2008; Warren and
McFadyen, 2010), means that it is not altogether utopian to
imagine that very large projects like Aberdeen Bay might one day
be partly citizen-owned. Indeed, this seems to be the direction
of travel in Scotland at present with Scottish Government advice
recommending community shareholdings, although not being
entirely explicit as to sources of finance to underpin such
community shareholding. At the same time, CE schemes are
gaining in importance as energy suppliers, through RE supply
cooperatives like Som Energia (SP2) and Ecopower (BE12).
At present, one important limitation for CE projects is the
need to negotiate with Distribution Network Operators (DNOs)
(Magnani and Osti, 2016), who may be sole operators in
protected markets (see e.g., section 4.1.1 in Hewitt et al., 2017).
The obvious solution to this problem is for CE initiatives to
become DNOs themselves, and there have been recent such
attempts in Germany, and one notable success in the city of
Hamburg (Magnani and Osti, 2016).
Our study also shows that successful CE schemes are
invariably partnerships between community groups, private
companies and particularly, local government. In Southern
Europe especially, local government plays a key role in CE. In
Spain, citizens’ movements have recently taken control of many
towns and cities, and begun to develop their own vision of
energy transition (e.g., in Cadiz and Barcelona), the waves of
“re-municipalization” of local energy supply in Germany have
already been mentioned (Wagner and Berlo, 2017). In spite of
the relative weakness of local government in the UK, similar
movements have begun to emerge there also (e.g., Robin Hood
energy; Hiteva and Sovacool, 2017). Thus, the growth of CE
from minority activism to mainstream acceptance, eventually
accompanied by strong political support in some countries [e.g.,
in Germany and UK (Scotland)], can be seen as a reflection
of the growing understanding by actor communities across
public, private and third sectors of the potential benefits to each
of them. Many schemes are increasingly public-private-third
sector hybrids, with for example, community shares offered by
a commercial consortium (UK 7), or PPP schemes with a citizen
governing board (SP 19).
Where Next? the Future of CE in Europe
In 2019 it is unclear whether CE will continue to grow as
rapidly in future as it has done in the period 2010–16, and there
is already some evidence of deceleration in several countries
(Table 2;Figure 10). Our study clearly shows that a supportive
legal and policy context is important to successful implantation
of CE projects, and that in its absence, the development of CE has
been seriously constrained, e.g., in Italy, Spain and Poland. In the
UK, progress in CE was slow until FiTs were finally introduced,
after which they enjoyed a brief golden age until rules were
tightened in 2014 and the numbers of new CE initiatives fell.
They are likely to fall further when FiTs are removed in 2019.
In Italy and Germany, changes to FiTs in 2013 also dramatically
affected the CE landscape (Candelise and Ruggieri, 2017; Kahla
et al., 2017). In Sweden, low prices, lack of security for investors
and a complicated and ambiguous permissions process have led
to a decline in new wind power investments since 2015 (Kooij
et al., 2018; Wizelius, 2018). Unprofitable CE schemes may sell
out to larger suppliers, leading to consolidation in the hands
of large companies (Wizelius, 2018). This raises the question to
what extent CE can realistically be “upscaled” in a competitive
business environment. In case of business failure, citizen buyouts
of commercial schemes, such as those in France (e.g., FR 14)
can simply be reversed. It is unclear to what extent CE can
be protected against the centralizing tendencies of the market
without specific legislation in place.
At the same time, however, CE initiatives have proved adept
at finding ways around even the most byzantine rules and
constraints. Wizelius (2018) notes that wind cooperatives in
Sweden did develop, in spite of quite unfavorable conditions.
Even though the energy generating coop in the style of Germany
or Sweden did not take off in Spain, Spanish REScoops have
found an important niche as green energy resellers, and are
taking market share from the energy giants. CE innovators are
getting wiser, and, increasingly, hybrid strategies are emerging
that reduce risk and increase the chances of success, even in the
face of indifference and even outright hostility to the sector. In
Germany, the shift from the cooperative to the company-based
partnership model (GmbH & Co. KG) is one such example, in
the UK, the introduction of wholly owned private companies that
exist only to sell electricity and distribute returns, leaving their
not-for-profit parent organization to concentrate on community
development, is another.
The emergence of these new forms in successive waves of
innovation (Table 3) can be identified as an adaptive cycle
(Cremades et al., 2018). The SI framework proposed here is a
useful vehicle for beginning to unpick the inherent complexity
that this implies; this is, however, a task that we must leave for
future research.
As the recent IPCC report notes (IPCC, 2018), the scale of the
remaining challenge to decarbonize energy systems remains huge
and, in light of this, governments may prefer to transact deals
with large-scale experienced energy producers than a myriad of
communitarian initiatives, with its associated high transaction
costs. In light of this, the emergence of hybrid structures of joint
ownership seems a more likely proposition than a more deeply
relocalized and redemocratised energy supply and distribution.
This will not stop innovation with regard to new business
models and new forms of social innovation, but the challenge
to decarbonize rapidly may limit the scope of these alternative
approaches which offer so much potential in engaging citizens
and empowering communities.
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Hewitt et al. Social Innovation in Community Energy
Limitations of the Study and
Future Research
The study clearly has some important limitations. In terms of
the survey and mapping exercise, although a serious attempt
was made to be obtain representative examples of CE from
all parts of each country, difficulties of data availability,
together with the wide variety of potential definitions of
CE mean that there are some notable differences in the
nature and quality of the information presented between
countries. We feel that this is unavoidable given the
scope of our study, but nevertheless, the database of CE
initiatives should be considered a starting point for more
detailed study, not a definitive statement. In particular,
future research is likely to prove fruitful in the following
key areas:
•CE in former communist countries of Central and
Eastern Europe.
•Enablers and barriers of CE initiatives. There are studies in this
field, but they tend to be single country-focused, and up-to-
date general reviews of this aspect for the European context
are scarce.
•CE financing and economic opportunities for communities.
A comparative study of different financing arrangements for
community projects, and an evaluation of their attractiveness
and level of uptake.
•Spatial analysis of distribution and diffusion of European CE.
Can common geographical or socio-economic indicators be
identified that drive the development of SI in CE?
•Quantification of the real impact, in terms of energy
generation or energy savings, of CE initiatives, compared to
mainstream commercial energy generation.
•Research into the potential impact of CE to disrupt markets
and challenge the energy multinationals.
•CE networks, e.g., using sociograms (e.g., Alonso et al., 2016),
or social network analysis (e.g., Verbong and Geels, 2007).
CONCLUSIONS
This research has contributed to developing a more complete
picture of a well-studied, but highly fragmented, research
area. CE is a very diverse phenomenon, with participation
of a large range of private, public, and third sector actors.
CE in its various forms is embedded everywhere in Europe
except in the former communist countries of the center
and east of the continent, and there are some signs of
decentralization (if not yet clearly recognizable CE), there too,
as evidenced by the recent “energy cluster” initiatives in Poland.
It remains to be seen if bona fide examples of CE will emerge
there too.
Social Innovation provides a useful framework for
analysis of CE projects. Broadly accepted definitions of SI
emphasize the importance of specific crises or opportunities
to provide the necessary impulse for social change. From
this perspective, it is possible to identify three broad phases
of CE, each associated with different crises or opportunities.
The “oil shocks” of the 1970s offer a clearly identifiable
crisis, and the increasingly influential environmental
movement provided a social context able to respond to
it in innovative ways. These were both social (radical
movements for change, new institutions and structures)
and technological (experimentation with renewable energy).
In Sweden and Germany, cooperatives were renewable energy
pioneers, as mainstream sources of capital financing were not
initially available.
In the second phase of the innovation cycle, large companies
came on board, FiTs and certification schemes were introduced
by governments, which increased the viability of community
projects but also crowded them out of the marketplace, which
was increasingly occupied by large energy firms. The EU
directive on energy market liberalization, generous incentives,
and a sharp fall in the price of solar technology facilitated CE
developments. Nonetheless, in countries with highly centralized
or fossil-fuel dependent energy sectors (e.g., Belgium, Poland,
France) CE initiatives developed slowly (Belgium), not at
all (Poland), or were not really driven by citizens (France).
Italy and Spain, despite increasing capacity in renewables,
remained at the margins in terms of CE innovation even
after the introduction of generous incentives because the
niche that CE might have occupied in pioneering renewables
(e.g., as it did in northern Europe) had been filled by large
companies. In the UK, while incentives for renewables were
in place since 1990, they tended to favor larger developers
(Cowtan, 2017), and thus the first CE project did not emerge
until 1997.
The Great Recession of 2008 marks the beginning of a third
wave of innovation in CE. This seems to have been driven by
a crisis of acceptance of the “extractivist” development model
which large developer-led projects had come to symbolize, in
the context of citizens’ growing dissatisfaction with rapidly
increasing energy prices under a declining economy. This latest
phase of innovation is marked by the appearance of new
forms of CE, like the CDT model developed in Scotland,
the proliferation of supply cooperatives in Spain and Italy,
and of a wide range of grassroots energy movements like
transition towns, community sustainability initiatives and energy
transition “roundtables.”
The last of these three phases is by far the most inclusive
and participatory. Unlike Phase I, it is not mainly about
persuading other actors (i.e., governments) to “do something,”
and unlike Phase II, it does not emphasize cleaner production
(i.e., renewable energy) as an end in itself, though this remains
an important underlying theme. Instead, it is much more
closely tied to citizens’ concerns around the democratization
and decentralization of energy. It recognizes that energy is
not just about electricity, and emphasizes holistic solutions,
like waste reduction and the circular economy. It demands
that the benefits of energy should be shared more widely.
Above all, it fights to redefine energy as a right which citizens
should enjoy, rather than as a commodity to be sold to the
highest bidder.
Looking to the future, some troubling tendencies can be
perceived. The latest boom in CE has slowed, and financial
incentives are being removed or reduced. CE has probably
Frontiers in Energy Research | www.frontiersin.org 22 April 2019 | Volume 7 | Article 31
Hewitt et al. Social Innovation in Community Energy
reached its peak. In Germany, Sweden and France, it seems
likely that REScoops could be absorbed by large companies in
a new round of acquisitions and mergers if declining revenues
make CE schemes unprofitable. The abolition of the FiT in
the UK in 2019 poses a serious threat to the viability of
the CDT model pioneered in Scotland. The Spanish supply
cooperatives are still growing, but occupy only a very small
sector of the electricity market (Capellán-Pérez et al., 2018). In
France and Poland the future looks brighter, but it is unclear
to what extent citizens are really being engaged in either of
these countries. However, CE initiatives in their diverse forms
are likely to continue to act as incubators for ideas that are
later adopted by the mainstream. In this sense, the focus on
sustainability, energy efficiency and fairer distribution of returns
that is characteristic of many grassroots CE initiatives today is an
encouraging sign.
AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
The study was conceived by RH, with the support of CB, BS, and
NB. NB devised and tested the initial search methodology. RH
wrote the article based on detailed surveys of CE in each country
and synthetic text provided, for each of the case study countries,
by CB (France), NB (Belgium), AB (Italy), RC (Germany), and
AC and IMO (Poland). RH carried out the surveys and wrote text
for Sweden, UK and Spain. MM Prepared the maps for all case
study countries. All authors contributed to revising and editing
the text.
FUNDING
This work was funded by the Rural Affairs and the Environment
Strategic Research Program of the Scottish Government, and by
the European Commission under the remit of European Union
Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program grant No.
677622, awarded to the project Social Innovation in Marginalized
Rural Areas (SIMRA).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors are grateful to Maria Nijnik and David Miller of the
James Hutton Institute for the key role they played in facilitating
this work within the remit of the SIMRA project. We would
also like to thank Jelte Harnmeijer for his helpful comments
on an earlier draft of this manuscript. IMO acknowledges
funding from the Earth League alliance and AC acknowledges
the financial support of the Stiftung der Deutschen Wirtschaft.
We are also very grateful to the editors for their patient
handling of our contribution, and to two reviewers whose
helpful recommendations led to considerable improvements to
our paper.
SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL
The Supplementary Material for this article can be found
online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.
2019.00031/full#supplementary-material
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Conflict of Interest Statement: The authors declare that the research was
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Copyright © 2019 Hewitt, Bradley, Baggio Compagnucci, Barlagne, Ceglarz,
Cremades, McKeen, Otto and Slee. This is an open-access article distributed
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Hewitt et al. Social Innovation in Community Energy
APPENDIX
Table A1| Key literature on social aspects of CE in chronological order.
Key literature on social
dimension of CE
Main classifiers Key themes
Maruyama et al., 2007 Social innovation in energy Wind farms as hubs for uniting like-minded people
around a common interest.
CE as an investment opportunity.
Walker, 2008 Community-owned energy
production
Communities of practice (or interest) vs. communities of
place (or locality).
Walker and Devine-Wright, 2008 Community energy Citizen participation in project development (process),
and/or sharing collective benefits (outcomes)
Some definitions of CE not necessarily participatory or
for civic benefit.
Van der Horst, 2008 Social Enterprise and Renewable
energy
Social enterprise as a solution to an underperforming
private sector.
CE projects as Social Enterprises (SE)
The beneficial role of, and need for, “bridging
organizations” like Highlands and Islands Renewable
Energy Company (HICEC, later Community Energy
Scotland) in supporting SE in CE
Seyfang et al., 2013 Community energy Communities (place or interest) have a high degree of
ownership and control.
Initiatives are very diverse
Community maybe more important than energy
CE not a single, classifiable entity that can be “upscaled”
or “outscaled”
Needs consistent policy support and funding
Kunze and Becker, 2014 Energy democracy Energy democracy concept as a framework for analyzing
underlying motivations of CE cases. Power of energy
oligopoly and the role of citizens’ movements.
Becker and Kunze, 2014 Collective and politically motivated
renewable energy (CPE)
Collective ownership and political motivation seen as
more important than localism. Motivations of the original
projects as a starting point for any definition.
First Europe-wide perspective on CE.
Bauwens and Defourny, 2017 Social capital Social identification with the cooperative, generalized
interpersonal trust and network structure.
Public benefit vs. mutual benefit.
Becker et al., 2017 Social entrepreneurship Purpose of initiative
Organizational form
Community and wider social embeddedness
Hiteva and Sovacool, 2017 Social Innovation Energy Justice
Energy Service Companies
Business models
Supporting local conditions, not upscaling.
Szulecki, 2018 Energy Democracy Operationalization of the energy democracy ideal for
policy on the basis of three elements or “levels”;
democratic popular sovereignty; participatory
governance; and civic ownership.
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