Community Energy and a Just Energy Transition

In recent years, measures to stimulate local and rural communities’ involvement in the generation of renewable energy have been rather optimistically promoted as a means to engender greater legitimacy in and democratization of energy governance, tackle fuel poverty, and deliver energy justice. This chapter assesses what we really know about community energy and its suitability to deliver an equitable energy transition. It scrutinizes evidence from selected EU Member States that have pioneered the mainstreaming of community energy through the lens of justice theories, with the objective to gauge whether and how these policies address core justice questions associated with the energy transition, and the role of law in providing an answer to these. This chapter aims to probe the sometimes uncritical assumptions about community energy, highlighting the complex, layered, conflicting justice claims that underlie its mainstreaming. In order to do this, the chapter distils a set of distributive, procedural, and restorative justice questions associated with community energy, and considers the way in which they have been addressed, drawing on examples from Denmark, Germany, and the UK.