Community Energy Investment Web Sites

Discussion

Rob Hopkins:

"We now have several community energy investment web sites where investors can get very attractive rates of return by investing in something they believe in. These sites include Ethex, Trillion Fund and Abundance. This adds up to a quiet revolution in energy enabled by good government policy, web based peer to peer investing, and people who wish to get a return on their money but are shying away from investing in more traditional places like the stock market. This shift is being driven by investor appetite, a failure in traditional investing strategies both because of a failure to generate the sort of returns, high risk, and well-documented market rigging, and also something called impact investing.

Impact investing is investing to achieve a return in something you also believe in and wish to support. It is also being driven by government support, mostly through the Feed In Tariff or FIT, but also through sensible planning regulations (except notably for land based wind projects) and other measures. There is also the wish by many communities to own their energy resources, which unlike fossil fuel are local, generate jobs and investment, and are location specific. " (https://www.transitionnetwork.org/blogs/rob-hopkins/2015-07/transition-network-conference-2015-community-energy-revolution)