Building a sustainable energy future, one community at a time

Solving energy issues requires integrated solutions at all societal and institutional levels. Community renewable energy and energy efficiency initiatives offer a complementary model for renewable energy deployment and have several advantages over the prevailing “top down” strategy employed in the US. In this paper, we present a review of the theoretical basis for community energy as a catalyst for energy behavior change; examine contrasting viewpoints of the definition of community energy; and review community energy literature. The first literature review compares energy behavior lessons from context independent individualistic and context dependent collective action theories. The review of community energy literature lists the energy option and geographical focus of more than 70 community energy studies from around the world and summarizes key lessons from this literature. In addition, we also present the data sources for a new US Community Energy Database that will be publicly available in the near future and introduce a new classification system for community renewable energy projects based on the results of this database. Finally, we present recommendations for future research in this rapidly growing field.