NEWCOMERS: Benefits for community members in terms of increased access to clean, secure and affordable energy
Creators: name: Kamin, Tanja
name: Golob, Urša
name: Kogovšek, Tina
name: Medved, Primož
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2022
Subjects: clean energy, energy community, social practice, consumer value, sustainability, behaviour change, attitudes, knowledge, learning, benefits, energy security

description: 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, the general research question of D6.1 is: <em>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?</em> 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 variety of reasons related to themselves, the community, and wider society. Thus, the analysis revealed that the benefits of clean energy communities are wide-ranging and reach beyond environmental and financial aspects. The benefits should be understood from the perspective of members: how they see and value them. One of the important implications of our study therefore points to the need to identify ways to divulge why (benefits, values) and how (achievability) to engage with different models of clean energy communities. Identified barriers and inhibiting factors that prevent potential citizens from joining or creating new communities need to be properly addressed, and the ‘clean energy knowledge bank’ should be made widely accessible to the interested public. Clean energy communities often represent a ‘catalyst for innovation’ for energy-related and environmental activities in general. Therefore, one of the main identified opportunities for the project is the diffusion of the accumulated knowledge that was developed across the studied clean energy communities. The data suggest that the spread of clean energy communities across society could be contributing not only to gradual transformation to clean energy systems, but also to the increase of environmental consciousness in general across Europe.