Exploring Scaling Mechanisms of Energy Communities

Energy communities are taking on a growingly prominent role in future climate governance systems. This is particularly true for how these self-organized and local-scale manifestations of the energy transition are institutionalized throughout the European Union. The implementation of the Clean Energy for all Europeans package into national contexts creates a peculiar heterogenization of energy community models in the European context arguably creating a polycentric network of initiatives. These community models are embedded in a polycentric setting characterized by a growing number of governance levels, varied decision-making centers and domains of action, as well as the growingly codified set of overarching rules. With-in this framing the question remains as to how small- and local scale action can be aggregated into effective climate mitigation. Against this backdrop, the paper investigates to what extent scaling mechanisms need to be considered when planning for the institutional context of diversifying energy community models. By conducting a Qualitative Comparative Analysis of energy communities across Europe we find a number of scaling mechanisms at play – and in particular diverse combinations, which lead to scaling. Accordingly, we assess the scaling of energy communities at three levels. We explore firstly how communities organize with-in, secondly how they interact between communities, and finally what type of context the communities are embedded in. Our results indicate that diverse energy community models result in a variety of scaling pathways as well as particular combinations of scaling mechanisms in the process. We sketch the relevance of our findings for two bodies of literature which are often invoked in these debates: strategic niche management approach and polycentric governance, and see great potential for enhancing currently existing frameworks there.