NEWCOMERS: Benefits for community members in terms of increased access to clean, secure and affordable energy

Tanja Kamin, Urša Golob, Tina Kogovšek, Primož Medved
2022 Zenodo  
The central mission of the NEWCOMERS project is to encourage empowerment processes for EU citizens to participate in and contribute to clean energy transitions. In this deliverable, our focus is on identifying the variety of possible benefits of new clean energy communities and types of value they have for their members (and could have for society at large), as well as identifying members' assessment of the potential of clean energy communities in supporting the clean energy transitions. Thus,
more » ... he general research question of D6.1 is: How do clean energy communities meet consumers' needs for clean, secure, and affordable energy in their everyday life settings and circumstances, and how do they perceive the value of clean energy communities in comparison to previous energy service models? The conceptual foundation of our qualitative study was based on an individual-practice framework within which the individual-value-practice (IVP) model was developed as a guide to understand the empirical data. We collected data with semi-structured interviews that were carried out across 10 new clean energy communities. Involvement in a new clean energy community is unavoidably related to evaluative judgements of such involvement and is affected by preferences related to other practices. To understand the potential that clean energy communities can have for diffusion on a larger scale in a particular society, it is necessary to explore such evaluations and identify factors that might affect them. Our results show that clean energy communities could, in the immediate future, represent an important player in the energy sector and be a significant contributor to an inevitable sustainability switch. An important finding suggests that apart from the obvious renewable energy-related benefits of clean energy communities (e.g. production of clean renewable energy, reducing CO2 emissions, reducing the environmental footprint, etc.), members also valued their involvement in these communities and clean energy in general for a vari [...]
doi:10.5281/zenodo.6560891 fatcat:makemldyvrevxmnw5jomvisigm