After the Chernobyl reactor catastrophe in 1986, a group of concerned citizens – later on called the "Electricity Rebels from Schönau" – succeeded after a long strenuous struggle in taking over the energy grid of their town (Graichen et al. 2001). To this day, this citizens’ initiative has become a successful cooperative enterprise and one of the leading alternative energy suppliers in Germany.
After the Fukushima reactor catastrophe in 2011, similar initiatives have arisen in several German cities: Engaged citizens founded cooperatives in order to take over the local energy grids as a means to drive the "citizen energy transition". In contrast to the widespread cases of energy production cooperatives, these initiatives are remarkable examples for audacious civic entrepreneurship as there has been only one successful precedence.
The clearly political quality of these efforts as well as the cooperatives' resolute mission to establish more civic forms of business and create a decentralized sustainable energy system call for a specific approach to entrepreneurship capable of grasping several societal dimensions.
The goal of this paper is to develop a concept of civic entrepreneurship which is empirically substantiated in the peculiar case of new energy grid coops.
As any social enterprise is to be judged by its mission and achievements as to improving certain societal circumstances, the basic question of this study is: How can we appropriately assess the success of entrepreneurial civic engagement and what kind of (wider) understanding of entrepreneurial success do we need for this?
How is the (potential) transformative impact of civic entrepreneurship to be evaluated given the enormous countervailing power of entrenched corporations? In what sense is the foundation of a (grid) cooperative an option of activism within a larger social movement? What role plays the idea of emancipation in the concept of civic entrepreneurship?
As the case of new grid coops represents a very recent and (so far) marginal phenomenon, there are no empirical studies on this topic so far.
Research on energy coops in general, though, has been emerging since a few years ago. But only few publications refer to the topic marginally: While Elsen (2012) and Schreuer (2010) stress the social innovation character of energy coops, Debor (2014) evaluates the relevance of energy coops in terms of their socio-economic power for a wider energy system transformation. Huybrechts&Mertens (2014) discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the cooperative model in the energy context and the differences between new energy cooperatives and traditional ones.
Also conceptually there is a research gap, as the existing literature does not contain a theoretically satisfying concept of civic entrepreneurship. Granted, there are some publications using the term "civic entrepreneurship" (Henton et al. 1997; Banuri&Najam 2002; Goldsmith et al. 2010). But in order to tackle the research questions, it is necessary to browse other scholarly debates on society-oriented entrepreneurship forms.
Since the chosen case is obviously related to the question of sustainable development, the literature on sustainability entrepreneurship (e.g. Shepherd&Patzelt 2011; Kury 2012) is valuable inasmuch as the concept of sustainability provides normative criteria for assessing the mission and the outcomes of the entrepreneurial efforts in question.
Moreover, the grid coops' mission is targeted at changing ownership structures, forms of participation and power relations. Therefore, the literature on institutional entrepreneurship (e.g. Battilana et al. 2009) is highly relevant because it deals with the creation and change of various institutional settings.
Furthermore, if we take the term civic entrepreneurship seriously, a conceptualization of the political dimension of entrepreneurship is called for. An important starting point to develop this dimension is the concept of "public entrepreneurship" (Hjorth&Bjerke 2006).
The empirical study is an investigation of four cases. Since 2011 in four German cities cooperatives have been founded by engaged citizens in order to take over the local energy grids: (1) Teckwerke, (2) BürgerEnergieBerlin, (3) Oldenburger Energie-Genossenschaft, (4) EnergieNetzHamburg.
Comprehensive guided interviews with 16 founders, board members and engaged members of all four cooperatives were conducted, transcribed and analyzed by means of qualitative data analysis software (MAXQDA).
For the purpose of this paper, the comparative analysis of the collected data focuses on the foundation (origins, motives, entrepreneurs), the mission (goals, value proposition), the process (competition, organizational development), and the assessment of the results (success factors, barriers).
