Empowering Communites: a landscape analysis of renewable electricity ownership, benefits and research gaps.

December 01, 2025

This report is part of the David Suzuki Foundation’s Renewable Power for All project. It supports our work to better understand the barriers to community- and Indigenous-led renewable electricity projects in Canada and to inform our policy recommendations and advocacy. This report seeks to:

• Show where Canada is in terms of community ownership, and to highlight community benefit flows with renewable electricity projects – and identify gaps in this data.
• Identify the scale of opportunity for community and public ownership of renewable electricity projects.
• Highlight the importance of impacts and benefits of renewable electricity projects to justice and social acceptance.
• Identify known provincial regulatory and other barriers to community involvement in grid-connected renewable electricity projects.
• Identify other institutional barriers and research gaps for further study.

“Empowering communities” provides important information to foreshadow these outputs by exploring the potential and current state of community-owned renewable electricity as one means of empowering communities. It focuses on community ownership of renewable electricity by cooperatives, community economic development investment funds (CEDIFS) and municipalities in Canada and considers the other models of community ownership that may be advantageous to communities in Canada.

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