Regulating renewable energy communities: A distributive justice analysis of wind energy in Germany and Spain

Background Germany and Spain display starkly divergent patterns of community wind project (CWP) development, despite sharing a comparably high wind energy potential. This article argues that regulatory design constitutes a structurally significant and analytically underexplored variable in understanding this divergence—one that is directly policy-actionable in ways that path-dependent sociocultural factors are not. Methods Drawing on legal-doctrinal and comparative methodology applied across two institutional scales—Germany and Spain at state level, North Rhine-Westphalia and Galicia at sub-state level—the article analyses four normative dimensions: legal recognition of community actors, territorial planning regimes, financial mechanisms, and administrative procedures, assessing the distributive justice implications within each. Results The German regulatory framework exhibits an internally coherent institutional architecture that actively reduces barriers for community actors, whereas the Spanish framework systematically disadvantages community projects relative to corporate developers. Conclusion The article concludes with a seven-point normative blueprint identifying regulatory reforms capable of advancing distributive justice in Spanish wind energy governance.