Building on CrowdFundRES: Crowdfunding the Energy Transition
Creators: name: Alonso, P.
name: Caneva, S.
name: Weiss, I.
name: Arancón, S.
name: Fuentes, A.
Publisher: name: WIP
Year: 2018
Subjects: PV Economics, Markets and Policies
PV Economics and Markets

description: 35th European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference and Exhibition; 2178-2181
description: European countries have embraced a transition to renewable sources of energy at unprecedented scale. In the 1990s, few achieved a renewable share exceeding 5% of their gross energy consumption. Today, all 28 EU member states exceed that figure, in many instances by a considerable margin, as in the case of Austria, Denmark, Finland, Latvia and Sweden, ranging over 30 % of gross final energy consumption. However, despite the EU remains on track to reach its 20% renewable energy share target for 2020, achieving more ambitious longer-term target of at least 27% across the Union by 2030 will continue to require persistent and joined up efforts directed at seeking out innovative approaches, even more when the rate of renewable energy growth is slowing down in 2016 (to 5.9%) compared with the average annual rate of growth between 2005 and 2014 (6.7 %)[1].
This deceleration is partly attributed to the challenges of renewable energy project developers to finance their projects. Reduced access to conventional financing options over the past few years has triggered innovative financing schemes to emerge, with crowdfunding attracting a lot of attention.
The CrowdFundRES project, identified the vast potential of crowdfunding for filling part of the funding gap that RES project developers have been experiencing by bringing them closer to citizens who are willing to participate as contributors through the use of online crowdfunding platforms.
Crowdfunding can play an important role in the energy transition. With sufficient awareness of its potential among all stakeholders, crowdfunding is well matched to help address resulting funding gaps, provided we attract and sustain high-quality crowdfunding platforms targeted at renewable energy investment, raise awareness among project developers of the suitability of crowdfunding as an additional source of finance, better understand the behavior of individual retail investors and their interest in crowdfunding renewable energy projects, and ensure that the regulatory governance of the range of marketplaces that have emerged is fit for purpose to allow further scaling up across Europe, and without stifling market forces or ongoing innovation in the sector.
The project ran successfully for 3 years, co-funded by the EU under the Horizon 2020 programme. During the 3 years of project implementation, from February 2015 to January 2018, CrowdFundRES successfully achieved the following objectives:
• Deepening understanding of the adoption of crowdfunding for financing RES projects through a qualitative and quantitative analysis and online surveys.
• Performing regulatory analysis and case studies to identify the challenges faced by the application of crowdfunding for RES projects in Europe.
• Developing and applying guidelines aiming at supporting more effective practices for crowdfunding platforms, project developers and investors.
• Formulating policy recommendations to help improve the market and regulatory framework for crowdfunding and renewables in Europe.
• Promoting the crowdfunding concept and its advantages among those who could contribute or raise funds.
CrowdFundRES involves a consortium of renewables project developers, crowdfunding platforms, industry organisations, legal specialists and experts in the sector in order to help unleash the potential of crowdfunding for renewables development. The partnership has been led by WIP Renewable Energies (DE) and involved fourteen partners across six EU member states, representing stakeholders and market actors that are either directly or indirectly involved to crowdfunding. The project partners include the European Crowdfunding Network (BE) and four of the most active crowdfunding platforms for RES projects in Europe, Abundance (GB), Green Crowding/Bettervest(DE), Lumo(FR) and OnePlanetCrowd(NL). Three project developers with projects of different technological and geographical focus around Europe, BNRG Renewables (IE), Valorem (FR) and REG (JE). The consortium was completed by Solar Power Europe (BE), the University of Dundee (GB), Osborne Clark