The CrowdFundRES project has reached its end. The project ran successfully for 3 years, co-funded under the European commission Horizon 2020 programme, with the ambitious aim to contribute to the acceleration of renewable energy growth in Europe by unleashing the potential of crowdfunding for financing renewable energy projects.

During the three years of project implementation, from February 2015 to January 2018, the CrowdFundRES project successfully achieved the following objectives:

• Deepening understanding of the adoption of crowdfunding for financing renewable energy projects through a qualitative and quantitative analysis and online surveys.
• Performing regulatory analysis and case studies to identify the challenges faced by the application of crowdfunding for renewable energy projects in Europe.
• Developing and applying targeted guidelines aiming at supporting more effective practices for crowdfunding platforms, project developers and investors.
• Formulating policy recommendations to help improve the market and regulatory framework for crowdfunding and renewables in Europe.
• Promoting the crowdfunding concept and its advantages among those who could contribute or raise funds.

The partnership has been led by WIP Renewable Energies (DE) and involved fourteen partners across six EU member states, representing stakeholders and market actors that are either directly or indirectly involved to crowdfunding.  The project partners include the European Crowdfunding Network (BE) and four of the most active crowdfunding platforms for RES projects in Europe, Abundance (GB), GreenCrowding/bettervest(DE), Lumo(FR) and OnePlanetCrowd(NL). Three project developers with projects of different technological and geographical focus around Europe that were positively disposed towards the use of crowdfunding for covering part of their needs for project financing, BNRG Renewables (IE), Valorem (FR) and REG (JE).  The consortium was completed by Solar Power Europe (BE), the University of Dundee (GB), Osborne Clarke (DE), Global2000 (AT) and youris.com (BE), leader in the dissemination and communication of the leading-edge European innovation via TV media and the web.

The project results have improved the understanding of how crowdfunding is used for financing renewable energy projects and have helped analyse the challenges faced by the application of this innovative mechanism for financing such projects as well as the drivers of its growth in Europe. Among the potential impacts in the future:

• CrowdFundRES will support the development of renewable energy projects that have entirely or partly covered part of their needs for financing through crowdfunding.
• As crowdfunding expands to other countries and also covers larger projects, the growth will be exponential, with the potential to have an important contribution to the growth of renewable energy, especially in the period from 2020 onwards.
• Crowdfunding has shown its potential as a is a very useful tool for reducing public opposition for RES projects as it involves citizens from the local community and not only. It is difficult to quantify the actual decrease in public opposition, but it has been noted that it results to a reduction in the time taken to authorise construction of renewable energy projects which signals lower requirements for resources and thus lower transaction costs, both for the project developers as well as for the permitting authorities.

Overall, CrowdFundRES will notably impact the further development of renewables and the way citizens and communities will engage in the energy transition in the next decade.

We would like to thank you for having followed and supported the project through our activities and we hope that the results and news listed in this newsletter will continue to be of interest to you.

Kind regards,

the CrowdFundRES project team

If you wish to get in touch with the team, please find contact details here.