Collectives

Community energy co-ops

Turbines and solar arrays owned by the people who live beside them, on one member one vote. The shortest sanction ladder in this gallery — because the thing that actually kills them is not a member, it is a tariff.

Place
Øresund, Denmark, DK
Founded
1970s
Status
Contested
Duration
c. 56 years and counting

What is held

Generating plant — wind turbines, solar arrays, sometimes a district heat network — owned by the people who live near it and buy from it.

Who is in

Buying a share, usually with residency near the plant required or preferred. Most co-ops cap the shares one member may hold and give one vote per member regardless of holding — the rule that keeps it a co-operative rather than a fund.

Who decides

A board elected by, and answerable to, a general meeting run on one member one vote.

How the rules are made

The general meeting, inside the co-operative statute of the country of registration — and inside the grid code and the tariff regime, which the co-op does not control and which is where the trouble comes from.

How cheating is caught

Generation and revenue are metered, audited and reported to the members. What cannot be monitored is policy risk, and policy risk is what decides whether the co-op survives.

The sanction ladder

  1. A question at the general meeting, in public, to a board that lives locally
  2. A vote against the board at the next election
  3. Expulsion of a member under the co-operative statute

What happens in a bad year

A tariff change. A feed-in tariff withdrawn or a net-metering rule rewritten can end a co-op that is generating perfectly well and has broken none of its own rules. There is no internal rule that answers this, and that is why this page is filed contested rather than enduring.

Notes on the account

Look at the ladder on this page and then at the ladder on the acequia page. One has four rungs ending in expulsion from the water; this one has three and the last is largely theoretical. That difference is visible at a glance across the gallery, and it is a finding rather than a formatting accident.

The reason is that a community energy co-op’s hard problem is not on the inside. Members rarely cheat, because there is very little to cheat at: generation is metered, revenue is audited, and nobody can quietly take more electricity than they paid for. The governance the co-op actually needs is governance of something it does not govern — the price it is paid for what it produces, set by a ministry, revisable annually, and answerable to an electorate that is not the membership.

That is what puts this arrangement in the contested wing. It is not in dispute the way subak is in dispute. It is unresolved: the form works, and its viability is decided somewhere else.

What is not settled in this draft

Nearly all the numbers. Membership counts, the Danish share of co-operatively owned wind, and the current tariff position in any particular country are all moving and none is checked here. HC-012 asks a practitioner whether the account of formation, financing and governance is the real one — and in particular whether “what goes wrong in year two” is right, because that claim is the one this page’s playbook panel rests on.

How to start one — Starting or joining an energy co-op

What it takes
A site, a grid connection offer, a group of people willing to put money in before there is anything to see, and someone who can read a power purchase agreement. The development phase is where co-ops die, and it is the phase in which nobody is being paid.
What it costs
A share, for a member — often a few hundred to a few thousand in local currency, capped so no one member dominates. For a project, the number that matters is development capital at risk before financial close, which is usually raised from members and is usually the hardest money to find.
The legal form
Varies sharply by country, and this is the row to check locally rather than generalise. Denmark, Germany, Belgium and the UK each have a co-operative or community-benefit form with different tax treatment and different rules on who may invest. The European federation REScoop.eu maintains country guidance; national law is what binds.
What usually goes wrong in year two
The tariff. A co-op that modelled its returns on a support scheme and then saw the scheme changed is the standard failure, and it is not a governance failure — the members did nothing wrong. The second, smaller one is that the volunteers who did the development are rarely the people who want to run an operating business, and the handover is often unplanned.

Not yet checked by a practitioner

Sources

  1. Wind Power and Co-operatives in Denmark — The Middelgrunden offshore co-operative, established 2000 with roughly 8,500 members, is the case usually cited. Membership figure not yet checked.
  2. Community Renewable Energy: What Should It Mean? — Gordon Walker and Patrick Devine-Wright, Energy Policy 36(2), 2008.
  3. REScoop.eu — the European federation of citizen energy cooperatives — Cited for the extent of the family across northern Europe; individual national figures are not checked here.