¿Cómo promocionar el desarrollo de proyectos de energía renovable mediante el crowdfunding?el caso Citizenergy

Abstract

Environmental and sustainable projects face difficulties to attract capital and, recently, entrepreneurs have started to get funds directly from the “crowd”, instead or/in addition of traditional investors. The objective of this article is to explore the characteristics of the business models (BMs) used to fund renewable energy sources (RES) projects through a specialized crowdfunding platform. First, we propose a classification which standardizes different BMs for RES projects making them understandable and applicable tools for investing (investor side) and funding (entrepreneur side). Second, using as a case study the platform Citizenergy co-funded by the Intelligent Energy Europe Programme of the European Union, we applied previous classification finding that the loans are the most widely used BM in terms of number of projects financed and total investment target. In addition, we find that the election of crowdfunding BM is related to the host, rather than to RES projects peculiarities.