Evaluating the Quality of Impact Indicators for Community Energy Initiatives

For two decades, new types of Community Energy Initiatives (CEIs) have been on the rise in Europe. Across Europe, thousands of initiatives exist. The portfolio of engagement is broad, potentially manifesting values through the realization of environmental, social and economic benefits. However, most evidence lacks a critical debate on the quality of indicators employed to assess their impacts. Synthesizing the literature streams on impact assessment and indicator quality criteria, this paper develops a workflow to guide the evaluation of the accuracy, usability, interpretability and understandability of impact indicators for CEIs. The workflow is then employed to compare exemplary efforts in impact assessment by the scientific community, governmental actors, CEIs and CEI umbrella organizations. The study identifies several areas of improvement among CEI impact assessments. Assessments by both the scientific community and governmental actors tend to rely on subjective opinions, misinterpret expected and materialized impacts, lack clear communication of impacts and associated indicators and focus on identifying instead of quantifying impacts. CEIs and CEI umbrella organizations show more systematic and well-documented assessment approaches, also attempting to rely as little as possible on subjective opinions. However, this leads to a more frequent use of proxy indicators measuring drivers instead of impact.