The Citizen Funding: An Alternative to Finance Renewable Energy Projects

The implementation of these territorial energy projects addresses a triple technical, legal and financial challenge, in order to create sustainable value on territories. Indeed, as Product/Service-Systems (PSS), these projects require high investments and the involvement of the future end-user as much as possible. An efficient way to involve the end-user is to allow its participation as a finance provider. This paper focuses on financial challenges and on alternative models to finance renewable energy projects through citizen funding. To do so, we analysed five alternative funding models both on an economic and “end-user/citizen” points of view. Our study underlines the heterogeneity of models in terms of value proposal, citizen involvement, governance or implantation on the territories, and proposes a new classification of these models.