Unleashing the potential of Crowdfunding for Financing Renewable Energy Projects.

Coordinator WIP hosts the first meeting in Munich with the 14 partners of this European project, with the aim of develop the practice of funding a project by raising capitals from a large number of people for supporting Renewable Energy Projects in Europe.

We are currently seeing a deceleration of renewable energy growth in Europe. This is partly attributed to the challenges for financing renewable energy projects. Reduced access to conventional financing options over the past few years has triggered innovative financing schemes to emerge, with crowdfunding attracting a lot of attention.

This is putting significant pressure on independent RES developers, from which only the well- capitalised ones are able to maintain control of their projects at the pre-construction stage, most often by increasing their own equity participation in their projects. There is, therefore, a need for making use of innovative financing options that will cover some part of the increased funding requirements and help bridge the existing funding gap. Key to achieving that is harnessing the fast growing crowdfunding market where projects and businesses are financed through contributions from a large number of sources rather than through just a few or one.

The idea of CrowdFundRES is to exploit the potential of crowdfunding for filling part of the funding gap that RES project developers have been experiencing by bringing them closer to citizens who are willing to participate as contributors through the use of online crowdfunding platforms.