Citizen preferences for co-investing in renewable energy: an empirical exploration of the “community-as-investor” acceptance of renewables’ innovation

We use data from an international discrete choice experiment (DCE) survey conducted across every BSR country: Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. Respondents were presented with different investment options to co-finance RE generation schemes. Through multinomial logistic regressions conducted on the survey data, we draw inference on the relative influence that different national socio-economic trends, energy cultures and demographic factors have in shaping citizen financial participation on different RE investment schemes and derive empirically validated insights on citizen-centric RE policy support as a key constitutive pillar of NECP design. We structure the chapter as follows: first, we conceptualise community renewable energy through a socio-technical lens and introduce insights from the social acceptance literature to enrich our conceptualisation. With this novel combination, we add to existing acknowledgements of citizens’ salience for the realisation of sustainable energy transitions beyond their traditional “end-user” role (Göpel, 2016; Schot, Kanger and Verbong, 2016; Ingold, Stadelmann-Steffen and Kammermann, 2019). Also, we attempt to refine the social acceptance framework forwarded by Wolsink (2018) by exploring the conceptual space resulting from the overlap of the community and market acceptance dimensions of renewables’ innovation – we call this the “community-as-investor” acceptance of renewables’ innovation.Secondly, we introduce the DCE survey as our main data collection tool, describe the development of our sampling and analytical methodologies and outline the steps taken throughout the data gathering process. We follow with a descriptive disclosure of our analytical outputs and present the results stemming from our regression analysis.We then reflect on the policy implications stemming from our results and discuss the impact that the EU’s latest shift on RE support policy – namely from a feed-in-tariff (FiT) system to a competitive tendering scheme in the form of auctions – has for incentivising citizen-led finance for CRE across the BSR. We specifically narrow in on the Danish and German experiences – two of the most prominent countries with long-standing traditions on cooperative association (Danielsen, 1995; Jørgensen, 1995; Kemp, Rip and Schot, 2001; Debor, 2018) – to illustrate the challenges that such a policy shift has brought in terms of hindering a more actor-diverse RE development pathway in both countries