While Table 1 indicates the sampling process, in this paper we will only portray three case studies as a short illustration of our arguments. The intention is that our work can contribute as a starting point for further comparative research. Of the many different ways of analysing these projects, in the remainder of this paper we will focus on the contribution of our data to the conceptual debate on community energy.

Three cases and what they imply for ‘community’ energy research

In this section we present three CPE projects and ask how their formal organisational structures, political motivation and also spatial extent relate to the idea of community energy. These examples are: the Welsh community of Machynlleth that represents a classic community energy project; the Spanish energy co-operative Somenergia, which has grown into a nationwide organisation; and the attempts of an activist coalition to implement a new participatory energy utility in the city of Berlin. All of these cases envisage a participatory collective ownership structure and are connected to wider aspirations for political change. However, they also differ in terms of how these features are actually spelled out.

Machynlleth: community energy in Wales

Our first example is the Welsh community energy pioneer project in and around the rural community of Machynlleth. The small community is a place of environmentalist tradition manifest in a variety of ecological organisations, notably Ecodyfi, a foundation that is devoted to eco-tourism in the region, and the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT), an ecological think-tank laboratory that developed the UK’s first ‘Alternative Energy Strategy’ as early as 1977 (CAT, 1977). Inspired by the first energy co-operatives in England and the longer standing tradition in Denmark, the community set up Wales’ first collectively owned wind turbine in 2003.

The core organisation to ensure collective ownership was the co-operative Bro Dyfi Community Renewables which was founded to finance the turbine by selling shares to the town’s inhabitants. After a fragile start, the local demand for shares finally exceeded supply (Interview 1). It was an offspring of the ‘Renewable Energy Investment Club’ and the unincorporated association ‘Dulas Valley Community Wind Partnership’ (Ecodyfi, 2013). This implies a two-step model to ensure participation. While the ‘upstream’ organisations serve the aim of informing and gathering the community, the co-operative at its core gives the means to participate in terms of ownership. Here members are united under the premise of ‘one member, one vote’ and also earn and decide over produced revenues. Its members form a sub-community within the community in terms of participation – a relation that gets blurred when simply speaking about community energy.

Concerning the motivation of the project, the overall aim was to provide locally-produced electricity accompanied by attempts to influence lifestyles among the population in Machynlleth and surrounding villages. The first turbine provided most of the energy needed by the Centre for Alternative Technology and, when there was a surplus, some local households in the community were also supplied (Ecodyfi, 2013). At least one third of the revenues were donated to the local community energy fund that was to support all local households in efforts to save energy, for instance, by applying for government programmes to pay for house insulation (ibid.). Further aims of the project included behaviour change and consumption reduction among the town’s population, achieved by, for example, providing education on energy efficiency and energy-saving lamps for free (Interview 1). In essence, the project combined local financial participation and energy sufficiency, targeting and challenging given patterns of unsustainable consumption.

Machynlleth was seen as a best-practice example that has inspired many subsequent community energy and CPE projects in the UK (Interview 1; Seyfang et al., 2013; Walker et al., 2010). But Machynlleth also exemplifies the localist peculiarity of most British and European CPE projects. A mainly local set of actors forming a coalition or community of interest has initiated a mainly local project that seeks to both re-invest revenues and to change the local community to a more sustainable direction. Additionally, contacts with other similar projects hint to the processes of networking and horizontal learning that are considered typical for community energy projects in an early ‘inter-local phase’ (Seyfang et al., 2014). This community project mainly acts locally, although wider societal change is a background motivation.

Somenergia: A nationwide energy cooperative

While locality is a key feature of 90 per cent of British community energy projects as well as most projects on the European continent (Schreuer and Weismeier-Sammer, 2010), there is also a trend towards larger, supra-local structures which are difficult to label as ‘community’-based but are still characterised by collective ownership and political ambitions. Here regionalisation and scaling-up take CPE ‘beyond the local’. Existing co-operatives, facilitated by the liberalisation of European energy markets, have widened their field of economic operation providing for clients from various parts of a country (for the Netherlands, see Hisschemöller and Sioziou, 2013). Even in those countries with a lower number of CPE projects, newly established projects have expanded to serve the growing demand for an alternative, green energy provider (Kunze and Becker, 2014). One example of this trend of regionalisation is the rapidly growing Spanish wind co-operative Somenergia.

Somenergia emerged into an almost national structure by attracting a large share of new members outside Girona, Catalonia, its place of foundation. Established in 2010, with some 17,000 members in late 2014 (Somenergia, 2014), Somenergia stands out internationally as a result of both their political determination and their large collective and participatory formal structure, rendering it an excellent showcase for supra-local CPE – and the linkage between participation and political aspirations. From the very beginning the co-operative was committed to an environmentalist and strictly participatory code (Interview 2). For Somenergia, the core values entail political and financial participation of all members, autonomy and independence for local groups, as well as education and collaboration with social movements on energy matters (Somenergia, 2013). The co-operative has developed a federalist structure consisting of a central board and local sub-units that exist independently and autonomously in choosing their focus of activity, for instance, education, project development or anti-fossil energy campaigns (Interview 2). While these ‘political’ activities are decided upon at the grassroots or local level, the nationwide existence of Somenergia poses a challenge to the existing oligopolistic structure of the Spanish energy market (ibid.).

Local groups can be found across the entire country, including the Canary Islands (Somenergia, 2014). They are incorporated through the General Assembly, which is constituted once a year and follows the previously mentioned co-operative rule of ‘one member, one vote’. Despite huge membership numbers equal voting was smoothly conducted using video streaming for a digital assembly in 2013 to spare costly travel and related emissions (Interview 2). Here organisational innovation has kept up with internal challenges while still securing collective ownership and a political orientation in participatory processes.

When trying to identify ‘the community’ in Somenergia from a classic community energy perspective one would portray the co-operative as a mixture of a community of interest and various communities of place. For instance, each local unit is understood as a ‘point of meeting and participation of the members in a concrete geographical area’ (Somenergia, 2014). It is possible to argue that it is the shared interest in renewable energy generation that brings these various local groups and thousands of members together. However, establishing the membership of Somenergia as a community of interest would not reveal much about how this community is actually kept together and how participation and the reproduction of the community takes place in practice. In addition, speaking of community might be misleading: among different groups there are different politics of belonging as for example in the debate whether Catalan or Spanish should be used as the language in meetings in Catalonia (Interview 2). Portraying the co-operative from a CPE perspective instead shows how these divides are bridged by institutionalizing a shared purpose (Rao et al., 2000).

The Berlin Energy Roundtable: A new form of state ownership for sustainable energy governance

Our survey of CPE projects has found that the transfer of the ideas of collective renewable energy to the larger cities can be described as a third spatial trend (Kunze and Becker, 2014). There are two sides to this development. First, local collective energy initiatives are often welcomed by city officials when they fit well with existing narratives of environmentalised city marketing (Beal, 2012). Second and more in line with our emphasis on the political character of CPE, there are campaigns to assert influence on the development of urban energy governance from the vantage point of social movements (Rao et al., 2000). Here it is worth noting that a city poses new challenges for the idea of community energy as both urban life and infrastructure display an increased complexity and diversity. This point is reflected in Ferdinand Tönnies’ (1957) thinking about the community-society divide that differentiates between small, non-anonymous and typically rural communities and societies that are anonymous and typical of modern life in cities. Our example of a social movement coalition in Berlin that eventually failed to win a referendum on a participatory energy provider, gives a model of how a politically motivated and collectively enacted energy utility might have looked in an urban setting.

Unlike the preceding case studies, the objectives here were not limited to the development of one particular organisation, but aimed at a general regulation of energy at a city-wide level. As in many German cities, the long-term contract (usually two decades) for the concession to operate Berlin’s electricity network is due to end by the end of 2014. A social movement coalition formed as early as 2011 to push for a remunicipalisation of the grid and consequently the entire energy supply (Moss et al., 2014). This coalition, the ‘Berlin Energy Roundtable’ (Energietisch), encompassed a wide range of actors from large environmental organisations, small NGOs, and leftist activist groups to anti-gentrification initiatives and some professionals from the field of renewable energy (Interview 3). In opposition to the city government, it was successful in collecting over 220,000 signatures, which was sufficient to secure a referendum on the remunicipalisation of the energy network and the foundation of a new participatory public utility. The coalition eventually was not successful, missing the required quorum of an approval of 25 per cent of the electorate by only 21,000 votes (0.9 per cent, Landeswahlleiterin Berlin, 2013).

The concept of the Roundtable envisaged a number of stipulations which would have embedded a strong participatory and normative approach in the (proposed) power utility. These included public meetings on a borough level, the public availability of core documents and an extended steering board. The latter would have been made up of one third from the city council, one third from the utility’s employees and the final third would have been elected directly by Berlin citizens (Berliner Energietisch, 2012). Secondly, the concept made an ‘ecological orientation’ mandatory, meaning the explicit aim to move to 100 per cent renewable energy provision. Additionally, the reduction of overall consumption was inscribed as a ‘central business objective’ (ibid.). Thirdly, the draft called for ‘social arrangements’ in a tariff policy that would have sought to prevent energy poverty. All of these ideas were refined in a process of grassroots democracy and decision-making by consensus (Interview 4). These three dimensions of a ‘democratic’, ‘social’ and ‘ecological’ energy provision stirred a wider public debate and posed a challenge to both the city’s government and the traditional mode of secretive and neoliberal governance that has characterised previous processes of awarding grid concessions (Becker et al., 2015).

While the ideas of the Berlin Energy Roundtable reflect the dimensions of CPE projects, it would be difficult to grasp them from a community energy perspective. Indeed, as mediated through state ownership any community practice would appear more indirect and channelled through formal participatory requirements. On the other hand, one could argue that Berlin’s entire citizenry would become a stakeholder. However, this would in strictly legal terms exclude those inhabitants of the city who do not hold the right to vote. It would also be imperative to actually make use of the opportunities for participatory procedures to bridge the gap between the state and single citizens. Nevertheless, and compared to co-operative models, any citizen could theoretically have seized their right to articulate an interest without the barrier of acquiring membership shares. The lesson we have derived from the case of Berlin is however not to think about ‘imagined communities’ in energy terms (Barnett et al., 2012), it is rather to underscore that we should not unnecessarily narrow down the focus of alternative energy projects by only focussing on small-scale community projects and non-state forms of ownership. This is especially relevant for larger-scale projects at the urban or city level.

Conclusion

This paper has introduced the idea of collective and politically motivated renewable energy (CPE) projects as a heuristic tool to broaden the debate on small-scale renewable energy. Unlike the notion of community energy, CPE is neither restricted to the communal or local level nor connected to British policy. In the CPE concept we have combined two possible characteristics of an organisation: a political motivation and a collective character put into practice. We define CPE by the necessary condition of collective organisation schemes in terms of ownership, benefit distribution or decision making. Prevailing political motivations or normative aspirations appealing to, for instance, consumption reduction, sustainable land-use or social equity serve as a sufficient condition. On methodological grounds, we have chosen this combination to account for the motivation of actors and people establishing CPE initiatives, and as a means to identify suitable projects by their collective formal structure. Our aim is to arrive at a conceptualisation that takes the motivations of the projects themselves as a starting point, which preserves community energy’s normative appeal and its strong foundation in ecological values. We argue that this concept can enlighten community energy research and allows for the inclusion of non-local and participatory public projects. This in turn widens the number of policy options in the energy sector for both social movement and state actors (Beveridge et al., 2014).

CPE projects continue to emerge across Europe, and we argue that the debates on grassroots innovations (Seyfang and Smith, 2007) can benefit from a careful international look at the present situation. The regionalisation and urbanisation of collective renewable energy projects as seen in the cases of Somenergia and Berlin renders it even more difficult to define who or what the referred community should be. When we talk of ever more complex and growing structures the cosiness implied in the term ‘community’ is no longer useful, while the aims of the organisations to produce renewable energy and to forge wider societal change remain as intact as their collective form of organisation. Revisiting our empirical data from different countries, collectivity as an expression of a specific idea of organisation by membership, benefit sharing or participatory decision-making appears more suitable for a clear empirical analysis than the loosely defined term of community. We do however not intend to entirely replace the notion of community energy as it has become an established term in political discourse highlighting opportunities for alternative forms of organisations in the energy sector. In suggesting the CPE concept, we rather want to inspire conceptual debate about how such alternative energy projects work and to enable internationally comparative research.

The concept of CPE and our results also connect to the discussions on energy geography as an emerging field of academic interest (Bridge et al., 2013). This debate has been widely influenced by attempts to spatialise transition and strategic niche management research (Coenen et al., 2012). In this context CPE research foregrounds issues concerning grassroots innovations (Seyfang and Smith, 2007). Finally, an assessment of CPE in terms of systemic impact on uneven development, and on social and environmental justice would be equally conducive (Bickerstaff et al., 2013). As the mapping of CPE and an introduction of exemplary cases is only a start in research, we invite representatives of geography and other disciplines to expand research on the idea of CPE, to further develop the concept and to deepen our empirical understanding of this transnational phenomenon.