Grassroots innovations for sustainable energy: exploring niche-development processes among community-energy initiatives

Community-led sustainable energy projects have flourished lately in the UK. The most substantial research to date identified (in 2005) over 500 such initiatives (Walker et al., 2007). On the consumption side, community-energy demand projects are likely to be of a similar or larger order. In 2010, the UK government’s Low Carbon Community Challenge attracted more than 500 expressions of interest. It joins a portfolio of policies (local to European) to help community projects and nurture local support for wider processes of low carbon energy transition (for example, HM Government, 2009; NESTA, 2009). Policy initiatives such as this suggest that governments have an instrumental interest in community energy, to help facilitate additional, larger-scale sustainable energy transitions. However, the rationales of community-energy participants are often broader in scope, covering community-development objectives, as well as perceiving that community-based projects deliver energy savings and behavior changes that top-down policy instruments cannot achieve. These very different perspectives on the role and potential of community energy suggest that policy support is not unproblematic.