Community Funding for Geothermal Energy

Abstract

Community funding is a tool to involve communities in geothermal projects in such a way that they can be involved in the decision making around the project and/or receive some of the benefits. There are different alternative finance instruments that give different options to involve investors from the community surrounding the project, thus realising community involvement, commitment, and funding for the project. These can be combined with risk mitigation instruments to limit the risk that community investors are exposed to. The characteristics of an individual project and the risk appetite and risk-absorbing capacity of community investors determine which combination of instruments is best suited. Because the outreach to, and involvement of, the community is very important for the acceptance, use and community support of geothermal projects, involving the community on the finance side of a project can be useful to make the successes and results of the project more accessible to the community.

Keywords

• geothermal energy
• alternative finance
• community funding
• risk-absorbing capacity
• crowdthermal project