Empowering Vulnerable Consumers to Join Renewable Energy Communities—Towards an Inclusive Design of the Clean Energy Package

Abstract

The unequal distribution of costs and benefits of the energy transition is a challenge for energy justice and energy policy. Although the empowerment of consumers to participate in renewable energy communities (RECs) has great potential for a just energy transition, vulnerable consumers remain underrepresented in RE projects. The recast of the European renewable energy directive obliges the European Member States to facilitate the participation of vulnerable consumers and support their inclusion in its “enabling framework” for prosumership. However, the type and specific design of corresponding measures remains unclear. Against this background this article investigates consumer empowerment in a vulnerability context. In particular we stress the need to understand how vulnerability affects participation in RECs to inform both policy makers and practitioners on its specificities and restrictions for the “enabling framework”. To prevent the inclusion of vulnerable consumers in RECs from remaining an idea on paper lawmakers need to be made aware of the implications for a consistent “enabling framework”. We argue that both individual vulnerable consumers as well as RECs need incentives and support to boost RECs’ capacity to include groups that until now remain underrepresented.

New Pathways for Community Energy and Storage

“…Hanke and Lowitzsch discuss the way vulnerable consumers may be better included in the energy transition, making use of new European legislation [6]. According to the authors, the empowerment of consumers to participate in renewable energy communities has great potential for a just energy transition; but, in practice, vulnerable consumers remain underrepresented in regional energy projects.…”

“…All contributions to this issue focus on the role of energy communities, energy storage, or both. Nine contributions investigate the potential and constraints of energy cooperatives, citizens energy and community energy [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]. Three contributions discuss both community energy and local energy storage [10][11][12].…”

“…Three contributions discuss both community energy and local energy storage [10][11][12]. Some of them take individual households as the point of analysis [10], while others explicitly discuss national [2][3][4][5]11] or European Union (EU) governance [6][7][8][9], or the issues of energy justice and social-technological dynamics [2,3,12]. Approaches vary from modelling [13,14] to theory development [1] and empirical studies, including case studies and surveys.…”

The Transposition of Energy Communities into Swedish Regulations: Overview and Critique of Emerging Regulations

“…In, for example, Germany, more than 70% of the members of the cooperatives were male, with relatively higher education and higher income. People with lower income were especially underrepresented, which is due to the need to have access to finance to take part in an EC [26]. Financial resources are often mentioned as the main barrier for participation in an EC [27][28][29][30], and the implementation of the CEP in the Member States needs to consider how to reduce these barriers to make future ECs more inclusive.…”

Implementing a Just Renewable Energy Transition: Policy Advice for Transposing the New European Rules for Renewable Energy Communities

“…To specifically address this, ancillary rules should accompany the transposition of RED II. For example: (a) provide target incentives for RECs that effectively include vulnerable groups; (b) exempting investments in RECs from the necessity to liquidate one's assets when applying for means-tested social transfers; (c) allowing direct energy subsidies for vulnerable consumers to be capitalised as a lump sum to join an existing or set up a new REC (Hanke and Lowitzsch, 2020).…”