More and more citizens are participating in energy cooperatives. What role can this co-operative form of business play in the future? The new BMBF joint project "EnGeno" aims to provide answers to this question. Irene Antoni-Komar and Niko Paech talk about the specific research objectives.
QUESTION: Between 2008 and 2011, the number of sustainable energy cooperatives quadrupled. Why is the co-operative idea making such a strong comeback?
ANTONI-KOMAR: In various areas of our society, we are seeing an increase in the involvement of citizens who want to play an active role in future-proof and sustainable development. Just think of the numerous Transition Town initiatives across Germany, in which people network and exchange ideas locally in order to shape a sustainable society together. As a co-operative form of business, cooperatives offer a good opportunity to combine economic activity with social, cultural and ecological goals.
PAECH: The attractive thing about co-operatives is that the principle of "one person, one vote" paves the way for more democratic decision-making. Anyone with just one co-operative share has the same power as someone who has subscribed a hundred times as much capital. This is why many people have a motive to participate not for the sake of capital realisation, but for the sake of social change. This turns the logic of conventional corporate forms on its head: anyone who joins with a lot of money in order to achieve high returns can be outvoted outright by low-income members who have acquired a share by the skin of their teeth.
QUESTION: Can the energy transition be mastered with community energy plants?
PAECH: Due to the democratisation effect mentioned above, conflicts of objectives and side effects can be dealt with more carefully. For example: Should our wind farm really be built in a landscape conservation area because that is where it will yield the highest return? Or do we want to be satisfied with a lower economic yield so that climate protection is not carried out at the expense of natural resources? Such conflicts can only be dealt with in a largely non-hierarchical and participatory manner if the capital, and therefore the decision-making power, is spread over as broad a basis of people as possible. The opportunity to involve many interests via the low entry hurdle - I can usually get on board with 100 euros - is high.
QUESTION: And where do you see the problems?
Transformation towards regional self-sufficiency
PAECH: Rather where the so-called "energy transition" consists solely of producing more energy instead of making energy consumption unnecessary, i.e. saving energy. But this is where it gets exciting for our project: could it be that energy cooperatives are a more suitable context for those innovations that open up new forms of energy saving and translate them into entrepreneurial action?
QUESTION: With the EnGeno project, you want to maximise the potential and opportunities for impact of energy cooperatives. What specific issues are you dealing with?
ANTONI-KOMAR: We are looking at the potential of energy cooperatives to shape the energy transition. This is not just about the economic goals of energy efficiency, but also about the ecological prospects of decentralising the energy system, the use of post-fossil and post-atomic renewable energies and even 100 per cent renewable energy regions. This means a transformation of the energy system towards regional self-sufficiency, in which local people jointly take care of energy generation and energy saving. In other words, providing for the common good.
PAECH: We also want to investigate energy cooperatives that want to act as grid operators. And we want to find out how the energy cooperatives come about, for example whether they emerge from networks, citizens' initiatives or other organisational precursors.
How do cooperatives affect the lifestyles of their members?
QUESTION: In the project, you also want to investigate the scope for action that energy cooperatives offer for sustainable quality of life. What exactly does that mean?
ANTONI-KOMAR: We are interested in the effects that participation in energy cooperatives has on members' lifestyles. For example, does the ecological footprint change in such a way that social practices become lower in CO2? Does participation in the energy cooperative also have an impact on other areas of life?
PAECH: Another interesting question is whether people who are involved in energy cooperatives are satisfied with less capital utilisation, possibly even with minimal returns. This could alleviate the pressure to grow. After all, the duality principle allows for constellations in which cooperative members are both investors and customers of their company, i.e. they simply want to be able to take good care of themselves and not also collect a fat return. In this way, economic activity is once again orientated towards the needs of those involved and not purely towards making money.
QUESTION: What are the next steps in driving the project forward?
ANTONI-KOMAR: In the near future, we will approach our practice partners, the participating energy cooperatives, and conduct surveys and expert interviews with them from the various work packages, which we will then analyse and discuss together in workshops. The aim is to take a closer look at both the personal level of the members and the organisational level of energy cooperatives as a cooperative form of enterprise.
Working on a typology of energy cooperatives
We will also work on a typology of energy cooperatives in order to better understand their emergence, stabilisation and diffusion. Finally, we will start working on three different scenarios in order to achieve valid criteria for the impact of energy cooperatives at the level of the energy system. We are asking about the significance of energy cooperatives in a centralised supply, a largely decentralised supply in a regional network and regional self-sufficiency.
QUESTION: Where do you want the project to be at the end of the three years of funding from the BMBF?
ANTONI-KOMAR: Our aim is to identify and test the potential of energy cooperatives in close cooperation with our partners in practice in order to scientifically support the realisation of a participatory and citizen-oriented energy transition and to advance it in practice.
PAECH: It would also be a good idea to integrate cooperatives as a special type of company into more comprehensive concepts of sustainable development. Perhaps we will learn how Business Administration needs to be rewritten so that it can harmonise with an economy without growth.
QUESTION: The project partners are the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Leipzig, the Institut dezentrale Energietechnologien gGmbH (IdE) in Kassel, the Eduard Pestel Institute for Systems Research in Hanover and various energy cooperatives. What tasks is Oldenburg taking on?
ANTONI-KOMAR: We are coordinating the joint project, but are also involved with our own work packages. On the one hand, this involves the cooperative organisational form of the energy cooperative and the issues of its creation, stabilisation and diffusion. We are also very active in the transdisciplinary approach of the project, i.e. we are working closely with the Hanover-based Pestel Institute for Systems Research, which is helping us to test our results in practice.