The role of cooperatives in overcoming the barriers to adoption of renewable energy

Recently, cooperatives have been created to promote the use of renewable energy (RE) most notably in Canada, the US, UK, Denmark or Germany. In order to develop the adoption of RE, the cooperatives have to seek to influence the behaviour of their members so that they switch from the use of traditional fossil energy to RE. This paper examines the various barriers to adoption of RE and the way cooperatives are circumventing those obstacles in order to develop the use of RE. This study surveyed a sample of 9 cooperatives from countries where governments are subsidizing the use of RE. The paper identifies a set of specific barriers to the adoption of RE by consumers. It also reveals that cooperatives effectively contribute to the uptake of RE with community-based social marketing initiatives that are lowering those barriers successfully. Those initiatives are related to educational communication, low prices, local offers with complementary services, and cooperative distribution. The paper put forwards a framework for the assessment of how each of those initiatives contributes to the diminishing of each of the barriers to adoption of RE. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.