Lessons Learned From Establishing a Rooftop Photovoltaic System Crowdsourced by Students and Employees at Aarhus University

Abstract

Energy communities are promoted in the European legislation as a strategy to enable citizen participation in the energy transition. Solar photovoltaic (PV) systems, due to their distributed nature, present an opportunity to create such communities. At Aarhus University (Denmark), we have established an energy community consisting of a 98-kW rooftop solar PV installation, crowdsourced by students, and employees of the university. The participants can buy one or several shares of the installation (which is divided into 900 shares), the electricity is consumed by the university, and the shareowners receive some economic compensation every year. The road to establishing this energy community has been rough, and we have gathered many lessons. In this manuscript, we present the 10 largest challenges which might arise when setting up a university energy community and our particular approach to facing them. Sharing these learnings might pave the way for those willing to establish their own energy community. We also include policy recommendations at the European, national, and municipality levels to facilitate the deployment of energy communities.