More than 40% of installed RE capacity in Germany is in the hand of citizens. The purpose of this study was to provide input on existing types of participation models in Germany and internationally, in order to derive at lessons learned for Thailand and other emerging economies to make them more aware of the benefits of local energy production. The GIZ Thailand will use the study to set up local renewable energy projects and share the findings with other institutions in emerging economies.
Since no overarching typology for community participation models existed until this point, the study developed a methodology and identified four basic models of community participation in energy production as well as different community groups investing in renewable energy projects. The models were illustrated with almost 40 real life examples of community participation in renewable energy projects. The study presented a visualization method to identify the number of community benefit streams, the share in investment of different community groups and the involvement of the community in decision making in renewable energy projects to allow project developers to easily understand the nature of a project in respect to community participation. To identify administrative, regulatory, legal, financial and market barriers as well as enabling factors, we developed a framework analysis model, that can be used to analyse the enabling environment for community participation models in any national context.