Community Power : The Story of How to Become a Driving Spirit of a Community Energy Project

Abstract: Community energy projects have such a fire burning inside of them. This often originates from or is at least fueled by the people in charge - let us call them driving spirits. We wondered what makes these inspiring persons so unique, which led us to our research question: What characteristics does a person need to become the driving spirit of a community energy project? We searched for existing driving spirits of European energy communities to let them tell their stories and have their voices be heard. In order to inspire others to realize their potential and possibly take action also outside of the academic world, we wrote our entire thesis in a storytelling approach. We set the scene by looking at the environment of energy communities and the role of the driving spirit. We analyzed the conducted semi-structured interviews and simultaneous observations using the theory of entrepreneurial leaders, to see whether their unique characteristics match the ones of our driving spirits. Overall, we found that their core characteristics are passion, vision, integrity, ability to motivate and the newly-identified aspect of team. These are complemented by resilience, self-confidence as well as being decisive, sociable, intuitive and flexible. Moreover, there exist interdependencies between the characteristics that have not been discussed in theory before. Going through this entire story of a thesis helped us analyze these people behind community energy projects, brought them closer to us and made us see how we - and maybe you - could potentially start our own story, following their example.