NEWCOMERS (New Clean Energy Communities in a Changing European Energy System)

Which new community energy business models have the potential to accelerate the energy transition in Europe? The Horizon 2020 project NEWCOMERS where IIIEE researchers prof. Jenny Palm, prof. Nancy Bocken and Dr. Katharina Reindl explores this question in a consortium of 8 partners from 6 EU member states (NL, UK, SE, SI, IT, DE).

To study and support innovative energy communities that provide European citizens with secure, clean and affordable electricity, IVM cooperates with University of Oxford, Lund University, University of Ljubljana, CNR – Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, RWI – Leibniz Institute for Economic Research, CONSENSUS Communications and GEN-I. The project with the acronym NEWCOMERS (New Clean Energy Communities in a Changing European Energy System) starts on 1 June and runs for three years. It is funded under the Horizon 2020 programme with a total amount of 3 Mio. EUR. The research activities are carried out in close collaboration with 10 innovative energy communities across Europe.

Using a highly innovative holistic approach – drawing on cutting edge theories and methods from a broad range of social sciences coupled with technical knowledge and industry insight – the NEWCOMERS consortium will analyse new energy communities from various innovative angles: (1) bringing in polycentric governance theory and the opportunity for learning between national and local polycentric settings; (2) using a business model logic to assess their ways of value creation and potential to be scaled up; (3) exploring benefits from the perspective of their members’ needs, while (4) keeping an integrated energy-systems view on their emergence, operation and wider diffusion.

Based on stakeholder co-creation, the NEWCOMERS project will deliver practical recommendations how the European Union as well as national and local governments can support new clean energy communities to help them flourish and unfold their potential benefits for citizens and the Energy Union. In addition, the NEWCOMERS project will provide a new online platform, Our-energy.eu, on which new clean energy communities can connect and share best practices while presenting citizens with opportunities to learn about ways to participate in the clean energy transitions.

In the NEWCOMERS project, IIIEE is in charge of mapping and compare polycentric settings in six EU countries. The analysis of the prevailing polycentric settings per country will be based on existing overview reports and articles, policy documents and other qualitative empirical data. We will map recent developments in energy policy and regulations, the basic characteristics of the national polycentric settings in the six countries and the transformation paths undertaken so far. An assessment protocol will be developed to ensure that information for each country is gathered and presented in a consistent and comparable manner, as to allow for further comparison and identification of bottleneck and issues at stake. The comparative method provides opportunity to detect causal relationships. It allows us to understand in what conditions certain effects occur or fail to occur.