Abstract

Community energy companies are an important backbone of the energy sector in the UK. Nearly 500 UK companies existed in 2021, collectively responsible for 300 megawatts with 217,489 people involved in the projects. Together they saved £3.35million from energy bills (Community Energy UK, 2021). The economic rules of how such communities function are not well developed in literature.

Elanor Ostrom (1971) propounded some general rules to keep a community flowing, however her work focused on more traditional communities. This paper explores how communities are formed and maintain their functioning, using her work as a starting point. The paper uses stakeholder theory to cement the role of community energy companies as a means of overcoming and mitigating Anthropocene risk. It further develops a metric which can be used to measure the effectiveness of such communities. Using the case study from a small Nottinghamshire village, we explore the above ideas in greater detail.
We also test the metric with sensitivity analysis