Replicating energy communities across Europe? Towards a temporal and systems analysis of business model innovation

Description

The EU’s Clean Energy for All Europeans package enshrines the rights of individuals and communities to generate, use, store and distribute energy. For its part, the EU appears to pin much hope on the development and potential replication of renewable and/ or citizen energy communities (ECs) across the European continent to transition away from fossil fuels and to deliver on the EU’s Paris Agreement commitments. Notwithstanding the ambiguous and almost certainly contested engagement of genuine community involvement within ECs, the potential of these disruptive new entrants to (a) emerge and become established as viable enterprises within rapidly evolving national energy markets, and (b) replicate across highly contextualised, pathway dependent national energy systems remains, to a significant extent, unknown.

In this paper we explore the governance of business model innovation, specifically the governance of EC business models. We build on contemporary work that recognises the importance and interplay of governance settings – broadly defined as the policies, institutions, market design, network rules, and the ‘politics’ behind them - on business models in the energy system, of energy policies creating new and destroying old value propositions. We advance a long-term, systems-based approach to the analysis of energy communities business models over time to further understanding of what works, where and when. We apply this approach in three case studies, on the UK, Sweden and Slovenia, which have high, medium and low levels of existing energy communities respectively.

Our approach demonstrates how the identification of viable EC models must be situated within diverse national decarbonisation pathways and transition stages. It advances understanding on the relationship between the governance of energy and innovative business models and directs attention away from the creation of ‘level playing fields’ towards the development of targeted policies to support current and future ECs.

Period	2022 Jun 21
Event title	3rd International Conference on Energy Research & Social Science: Energy and Climate Transformations
Event type	Conference
Conference number	3
Location	Manchester, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International