Is the Industrial Turn in Renewables Killing Denmark’s Energy Cooperatives?

This study contributes to sustainability transitions research by taking an energy democracy perspective on important, comparative aspects of community energy development. Locally rooted wind energy cooperatives have played an important role in Denmark’s clean energy transition but recently 4 out of 5 such projects have shut down. This development has been associated with a turn to large investor-driven industrial-scale renewable energy projects. The broader participation of cooperatives in other parts of Denmark’s energy sector has received little scholarly attention. The purpose of this study is to provide a synthesis across different technologies and types of cooperatives showing the industrial turn’s impact on the cooperative energy landscape. This paper builds on the identification of almost 800 energy cooperatives. Cooperatives remain a substantial part of the energy system in Denmark. They account for 26 percent of total turnover in the energy sector and are especially important in electrical distribution, district heating, biogas, and onshore wind power. Combining descriptive statistics and interviews with key actors in the field, this paper shows how the industrial turn negatively affects producer-owned wind and solar power cooperatives, and farmer-owned biogas cooperatives. Other types of energy cooperatives like district heating companies seem unaffected. A novel phenomenon is identified: The rise of energy mega cooperatives in the field of electrical distribution. These cooperatives have 100,000s of members and function as business groups with diverse activities in renewable energy generation and distribution. The study highlights a large potential for participation of retail- and housing cooperatives in renewable energy supply and suggests that comparative perspectives are needed to better understand the potential for democratizing Europe’s clean energy transition.