Citizenergy: How It Works

Filter your interests

On the projects page, you’ll find offerings from sustainable energy platforms across Europe: cooperatives, crowdfunding and others. Sort them according to your interests to find your preferred projects. Log in to learn even more about them.

Support a project

Once you have identified a project that interests you, you can choose to support it by clicking “support project”. You'll be taken to the hosting platform where you can invest and get more in depth information about the offer.

Share your experience

You have supported a project and contributed to the energy revolution – congrats! Now it's time to let others know. Share via social media, comment on the project and rate your experience with the platform to help others in the Citizenergy community.

CROWDFUNDING

COOPERATIVE

What do you do when you have a big goal and too little money to achieve it on your own? You may ask your friends and family to help you by either donating a bit of money or giving you a small loan. When you expand that idea to an entire neighbourhood, community or region and build and organisation around it, it becomes a cooperative.

Energy cooperatives rely on members in the local community to band together and support projects that would be difficult to get started otherwise. Wind turbines, solar rooftops, biogas plants – many such projects get off the ground with help from the very community who later benefits from the energy they produce with the help of energy cooperatives. Energy cooperatives can cover small districts, entire cities, regions or even operate a variety of projects on a national level. It is all community energy – it just depends on how you define your community. Crowdfunding for sustainable energy projects is the natural extension of the cooperative idea to even larger communities. With the help of the internet, crowdfunding can draw support from people across entire countries and increasingly internationally.

Both cooperatives and crowdfunding take advantage of support from individual members of the public, or the crowd, to get projects up and running. One distinction between the two is one of structure. Crowdfunding platforms focussing on sustainable energy may have multiple different projects in different countries and may offer various types of participation (loan, donation, etc.) whereas an energy cooperative is a single organisation typically raising money to fund its own projects. Increasingly though, the lines are becoming blurred: cooperatives can make their own investment offers or can even make use of crowdfunding platforms to fund part of their goals.

PARTICIPATION TYPES

LOAN

A loan involves you lending money to a project who then repays your investment and pay interest over a period of time. Payback periods and interest rates vary from project to project.