Community initiatives for renewable energy are emerging across Europe but with varying numbers, success rates and strategies. A literature overview identifies structural, strategic and biophysical conditions for community success. Our analysis focuses on institutional structure, as we describe the variety between the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark, and place this within the institutional context of the policies, power structures and energy discourses of each country.

The first grassroots initiatives for renewable energy in The Netherlands were a small number of wind cooperatives that developed in the 1980s and 1990s. After a few years without developments, new initiatives started emerging after 2000, and after 2009 the movement boomed, growing from around 40 to over 360 initiatives. These initiatives form an active, large and diverse movement that uses various motivations, technologies and connections, which have changed over time. This article uses a mixed methodology, aiming to map the development of these different “waves of initiatives” and relate them to the way in which the initiatives fit with their institutional environment. Institutional changes—such as the liberalization of the energy market, changing energy policies and discourses and a policy field that became increasingly multi-actor and multi-level—have influenced the presence and activities of grassroots initiatives. The article concludes that the growth and increasing visibility of the movement can be attributed to a large institutional fit at the decentral level, but that the low priority for grassroots initiatives and the economic rationale of the national government have hindered the political influence and installed capacity of renewable energy production facilities of the initiatives.

In the past years, Dutch citizens have experimented with various kinds of innovations to organize the collective production of renewable energy, including shared wind power and solar PV installations. Most of these attempts failed mainly due to legal issues and tax rules. Yet, one model for solar PV on collective roofs was implemented more widely, namely the postcode rose (PCR, postcoderoos): a form of cooperative solar PV production within a set of adjacent postcode areas. Set within a broader transition perspective, this article studies the emergence and evolution of the PCR as an example of a successful social innovation in the energy transition, through an innovation biography and mapping of the evolution of the social and institutional network around the innovation. The various attempts for collective solar PV, with different degrees of success and uptake into the regime, present a key aspect of niche development, namely associational work (circulation and mobilization) focused on regime change. In conclusion, the innovation path of the PCR emphasizes the importance of the political and associational in the energy transition and in transition thinking.