Chapter 6 Making Power Differently: Exploring the Motives and Meanings of Community Renewable Energy Development in Cases from the UK and South Korea

Community renewable energy has been widely advocated as a mode of implementation of sustainable energy technologies that contrast in various ways from those of public or private sector utilities (Walker & Cass, 2007). Community energy projects have been established in many countries around the world, including various parts of Europe (DTI, 2004; Lauber, 2004; Madlener, 2007), the United States (Hoffman & High-Pippert, 2005, 2009), Australia (Moloney, Horne, & Fien, 2010) and Japan (Maruyama, Nishikido, & Iida, 2007), forming part of a more distributed rather than centralised pattern of energy generation. For Seyfang and Smith (2007) they potentially represent examples of ‘grassroots innovation’, forms of niche-based social experimentation with wider significance for the emergence of forms of transition towards sustainable socio-technical systems (Smith, 2007).