Crowd funding is one of the measures being considered by the UK's Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) to help resolve the funding issues encountered by many energy projects. The anticipated revised upper limit for the feed-in-tariff (FIT) from 5MW to 10MW would benefit community energy projects, with many schemes in the 5-10MW range likely to seek funding in the coming years. Well-structured opportunities, marketed on the right online platform and aimed at the right potential investors, make crowd funding a reliable and efficient method for getting projects like these off the ground. But it can be expensive when things go wrong. Typically, there are four categories of funding; equity funding, where investors receive shares or an equity stake in the project; loan-based funding (peer-to-peer), where investors loan monies directly to the project; reward funding, where investors receive a specific reward related to the project; and donation funding, where investors receive nothing in return, and which is usually associated with charities.
展开▼
