Common Solar Futures

The Common Solar Futures Project investigates the agency and motivations of local actors in sustainability transitions. The project explores drivers and barriers and the transformative potential of citizen energy community start-ups through a capacity-building action research partnership with grassroots and other local actors in two Danish cities, Copenhagen and Svendborg.

Citizen energy communities are voluntary, not-for-profit, entities that combine environmental and social community objectives. Important actors in these processes include community members, grassroot activists, planners and administrators in municipalities and energy companies.

These actors may share a common cause in their commitment to a decentralized and participatory renewable energy transition. However, they may take different roles, responsibilities, and attitudes when it comes to implementing concrete applications of energy commons, understood as community-controlled flows of heat and power.

The Common Solar Futures project intends to unpack this conflictual space and relate these experiences to issues of democracy and climate change mitigation. The project aims to provide new knowledge on the transformative potential of change agents cultivating new communal energy practices in the face of climate crisis.