Critical Study of the Legal and Economic Concept of the Functioning of Energy Cooperatives in Poland
Abstract
The law of 20 February 2015 on renewable energetic sources introduced the concept, defined the method of operation and the procedure for establishing and running energy cooperatives. Eight years after the announcement of this regulation, the list of energy cooperatives includes only six energy cooperatives (as of March 03, 2023). Due to the modest achievements of economic practice in Poland in establishing energy cooperatives, it can be concluded that the energy cooperative construct proposed by the legislator is defective or not competitive in relation to other solutions available on the market. It is puzzling that despite such visible tendencies aimed at supporting initiatives in the field of building an energy system in Poland based on renewable energy sources, an important element of which could be energy cooperatives, the legislator constructed (and has not amended it to date) such inaccessible and unadapted to socio-economic realities concept of an association of prosumers. The main cognitive goal of the study is to answer the question why such a concept of energy cooperatives has in fact not been adopted in the last 8 years in Poland. The following study will focus on the characterization of the main problems of the concept of the energy cooperative in Polish conditions in the current legal state. In particular, economic, legal and social factors, considered by the author to be of particular importance, will be taken into account. The basis for the analysis will mainly be legislation, because in the field of energy cooperatives, the achievements of the practice, on which a wider analysis could be based, are negligible for the reasons mentioned above.
Keywords:
renewable energy, legislation, energetic cooperatives, legal and economic analysisReferences
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The Jagiellonian University in Kraków https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0644-0552
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
