Legitimacy: the key to unlocking the transformational potential of community renewable energy (CRE)?

Community renewable energy promises to play an important role in reducing consumption of high carbon sources of power as well as in demonstrating the viability of novel business models within the energy sector built on principles of locality and democracy. However community renewable energy, in the UK at least, remains marginal, undermined by changing government policies and unacknowledged institutional factors. To understand better why this is so, the paper argues for an institutional perspective, which is applied to the analysis of interviews with 29 actors connected with community renewable energy in the UK. The analysis was facilitated by using NVivo 10 software for qualitative analysis, to interrogate the interview data and identify key themes implicating various types of legitimacy with the limited institutionalisation of community renewable energy. The approach highlights problems of legitimacy-building at the organisational and field levels for the growth of community renewable energy. These are bound up with continuing and new institutional rules and the deployment of strategies for (de)legitimising community-led entrepreneurial organisational forms, adversely impacting on the potential contribution of community energy to societal transformation.