Assessment of the energy cooperative service: the case of electricity distribution cooperatives in Brazil

Abstract

The creation of energy cooperatives has been frequently justified by the need to supply energy to remote regions which were not economically attractive to large companies. These cooperatives emerge in different energy sectors, including generation and distribution and more recently with a focuses on renewable energy. Brazil followed also this cooperative approach for the electricity distribution sector which could be easily justified by the dimension of the country and population dispersion. The interest of the cooperative models has been challenged recently based on the argued lower performance comparatively to larger companies. This paper proposes a framework for the assessment of the cooperative customer's satisfaction which was applied to the case of five electricity distribution cooperatives located in Northeast of Brazil. The case demonstrated the suitability of the proposed framework to deal with the required specificities of the target population and showed the higher performance of the cooperative for several criteria and in particular to aspects related to consumers' relationship.