The Relevance of the Cooperative Model in the Field of Renewable Energy

ABSTRACT While ‘traditional’ cooperatives operating for a long time in fields such as banking, agriculture, or retail, have received important attention in the cooperative literature, much work still needs to be done to understand why and how cooperatives emerge either in fields in which they have not traditionally been widespread (such as health and care, services, etc.), or in ‘new’ fields or sub‐fields (such as fair trade, microfinance or renewable energy). Research is even more needed insofar as ‘new’ cooperatives tend to differ from traditional ones in several ways, for instance through the involvement of multiple stakeholders (rather than a dominant one such as producers, consumers or workers) or through a stronger orientation towards general interest goals (beyond traditional mutual interest at the basis of most cooperatives). In this article, we analyze the emergence of cooperatives in the field of renewable energy. This emergence has raised a lot of enthusiasm among the supporters of cooperatives and citizen‐based renewable energy as well as questions regarding the viability and the replicability of this model. On the one hand, the assets of the cooperative model enable us to understand why this form has been adopted by citizen groups and has developed, although to varying extents, in many countries. On the other hand, the limits or weaknesses of the model enable us to explain why cooperatives are still a minority in the field of renewable energy and why their development is constrained by several obstacles.