ACCE financial handbook: a guide and several business cases

Community Energy Financial Schemes (CEFS) are innovative financing tools, dedicated to community projects. In order to fund community energy projects, they need to partner with funders (government, banks, philanthropists or investors) depending on the stage at which projects of local energy communities need financing.

Community energy projects need specific financial support. Because CEFS are new, innovative ways of funding these projects, they are themselves facing numerous barriers from creation stage.

This guide aims at facilitating the set-up of a CEFS. For doing so, it identifies the main barriers, and their resulting bottlenecks to set up a CEFS, and highlights solutions to overcome those barriers and transform obstacles into opportunities.

This report has been carried out under the ACCE project (Access to Capital for Community Energy).