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Community renewable energy has been widely advocated as a mode of implementation of sustainable energy technologies that contrast in various ways from those of public or private sector utilities . Community energy projects have been established in many countries around the world, including various parts of Europe (; ; ), the United States (Hoffman & High-Pippert, 2005, 2009), Australia and Japan , forming part of a more distributed rather than centralised pattern of energy generation. For they potentially represent examples of ‘grassroots innovation’, forms of niche-based social experimentation with wider significance for the emergence of forms of transition towards sustainable socio-technical systems .