The Axis of Community Energy

Community as a tag has been attached to a number of very differently organized energy projects with varying levels of community involvement. Some projects have the community largely as a passive beneficiary, while in other projects - such as those run as cooperatives - the community acts as initiator, investor and project manager, while in other projects again the ‘community’ constituent can be rather dubious altogether. So what counts as a ‘community’ energy project?

One useful framework for thinking about community energy is offered by Walker et al., (2008) in their paper Community Energy: What Should it Mean? Walker identifies community energy projects as having two dimensions. The first is the process dimension which is concerned with who is involved in the development and running of the project and who has influence over the project direction. The second is the outcome dimension which is concerned with who benefits from the project and how the project outcomes are spatially and socially distributed.

Experts in community energy were interviewed to find out where on the axis they felt genuine community projects lie. This yielded two main viewpoints which are highlighted on the diagram. Viewpoint A sees community energy projects as necessarily involving a high level of local public participation in the planning and running stages of the project; this perspective being largely based on normative principles of community empowerment and capacity building as an end in itself. An example of this might be a solar PV cooperative where the local community initiates and runs the project even though the financial benefits flow to all shareholders, a significant proportion being geographically distant from the community itself.

Viewpoint B on the other hand is more concerned about how the benefits of the project are being distributed, with community energy projects being those which directly benefit the local community as a collective even if there is little public involvement in the process. An example of this might be a municipal owned district heating system in which the public has little input in the planning and management but receives the benefit of secure, low cost, low carbon energy.

Although simplistic this axis offers a useful way in which to think about and map the role of the community in such projects. There is clearly no definitive answer as to what community energy ‘should mean’ but I think it is safe to argue that projects that consider themselves 'community' should fall somewhere in the top right quartile if we are to ensure that ‘community’ is an actor playing a genuine role in the project and not simply an empty catchphrase.

(G. Walker, P. Devine-Wright (2008), ‘Community Energy: What Should it Mean?’ Energy Policy 36 (2008) 497–500)