Consumer (Co-)Ownership in Renewables in Germany

Özgür Yildiz (), Boris Gotchev (), Lars Holstenkamp (), Jakob R. Müller, Jörg Radtke () and Laura Welle ()
Additional contact information
Özgür Yildiz: inter 3 Institut für Ressourcenmanagement
Boris Gotchev: Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS)
Jakob R. Müller: Universität Erfurt
Jörg Radtke: Universität Siegen
Laura Welle: Leuphana University of Lüneburg

Chapter 13 in Energy Transition, 2019, pp 271-293 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract The German legislator has made the “…preservation of the diversity of actors…” an explicit policy goal introduced since the 2014 recast of the Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG). Furthermore, sec. 3 no 15 of the 2016/17 recast of the EEG defines citizen energy companies as consisting of at least ten natural persons who are members eligible to vote or in which at least 51 per cent of the voting rights are held by natural persons with a permanent residency in the administrative district of the project location, and where no member or shareholder of the undertaking holds more than 10 per cent of the voting rights. Other measures at the national and the federal states level exist to support citizen energy. Finally, consumer (co-)ownership received explicit recognition of its crucial role in the 2018 recast of the Renewable Energy Directive (RED II) as part of the Clean Energy Package. As of today, RE consumer (co-)ownership comes mainly in two forms: individual ownership and/or leasing arrangements, especially for small PV or battery storage projects, but also for heat pumps, with self-sufficiency being a major motivation as the legal framework is shifting away from guaranteed feed-in tariffs; and collective investments differing with regard to motivation and organizational form. Three legal structures have become “standards” for collective investments in the German RE sector, namely (i) civil law partnerships in use mainly for small PV installations, (ii) limited partnerships with a limited liability company as a general partner common for medium- to large-scale projects, especially in wind energy, and (iii) energy cooperatives whose number has increased significantly in the past, especially in the period 2008—2012.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-319-93518-8_13

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783319935188

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-93518-8_13

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().