About five years ago, decentralized community energy, though etched in history books for having sparked Europe’s clean-energy revolution in the 1990s, was deemed outdated in the age of the ever-more dramatic climate crisis. Paul Hockenos explains the development. State planners saw it as a quaint and colorful, though ultimately bit-piece factor in the continent’s epic-scale task of converting Europe’s entire economy to renewables by 2050, which has been its goal, at the latest since the signing of the Paris climate treaty in 2015. Even a thickly woven, distributed network of citizen-energy suppliers, so it was thought – to the applause of the energy sector’s mega-players – could not charge whole cities or energy-ravenous industrial sectors. This kind of heavy lifting, they said, was for deep-pocketed investment banks and corporate utilities with billions to plow into gargantuan energy parks that would replace the coal-fired plants and nuclear power stations peeling off the grid one by one. But the planners overlooked a powerful human factor: Nimbyism, the Not-In-My-Backyard phenomenon. As countries double and triple their stocks of … Continue reading The Triumphant Return of Community Energy