Energy co-operatives business models: Intermediate result from eight case studies in southern Germany

Abstract

The energy turnaround provides a large number of questions for different scientific disciplines including the area of information technology (IT) and information systems (IS). Unfortunately, the domain of regional energy co-operatives and small utilities has been mainly neglected by IS research. The research in progress paper at hand describes the actual situation of such organizations and focusses on the existing gap in matters of business models (BM) for energy co-operatives. Energy co-operatives are a collaboration by either private persons or smaller companies that produce their own - primarily renewable - energy. Model and theory development of this research are operated by the methods literature reviews, case study research within the energy sector and graphical modeling. The resulting common practice business model based on the business model canvas contributes to the body of knowledge and allows co-operatives to derive own fitting models. The business model canvas is a strategic pattern to visualize the relationship between key partners, key activities and other “building blocks”. This takes the growing importance of energy co-operatives as well as the missing path to market of the new technologies into account.