Abstract
Energy communities equip citizens with democratic control over their energy assets, help them capture value locally and create a green, just and decentralized energy system. Such energy communities have grown, replicated their experiences and have been institutionalized in diverse settings. In short, there are plenty of empirical examples of energy communities that have scaled. In this article we explore how varied governance contexts contribute to the scaling of community-based energy governance and in effect the actor constellations of diverse institutional settings. Through a comparative case study analysis based on semi-structured interviews and document analysis, we examined 3 distinct cases: Courant d'Air in Belgium, Coopernico in Portugal and Zuiderlicht in The Netherlands. Each case illustrates a different type of scaling journey and a varied governance context - suggesting that multiple pathways towards scaling exist. Our results show that the mixing of cooperative, state and market logics can potentially result in trade-offs between the democratic potential of energy communities and the efficiencies other logics offer to the energy transition. We argue that an institutional logics framework allows for a clearer understanding of the impact governance settings have on the scalability of energy communities as well as the composition of these countries' energy systems.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 100203 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1-11 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| Journal | Earth System Governance |
| Volume | 19 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Jan 2024 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2024 The Author(s)
Funding
It was not before the 1990s that other types of renewable energy sources (RES) were considered and supported by public action. Until 2001, the existing feed-in-tariff (a guaranteed above market price) was source neutral. Then, it was revised to better integrate environmental impacts and better include renewables (Peña et al., 2017). At the same time, the ongoing liberalization process, which was to unbundle EDP, was slowed down. The Guterres government was “more cautious regarding the liberalization of the sector” and left EDP mostly under state control with a minority percentage of the company to be privatized (Guerreiro et al., 2019, p. 13). The following governments relaunched the liberalization and unbundling processes and revised the feed-in-tariff, to best follow EU market and climate objectives (Guerreiro et al., 2019). The following decade (2004–2014) shows an opening of the Portuguese and Spanish energy markets to one-another. This opening was accompanied by a strategic turn of EDP towards renewables, active in retail and production (Guerreiro et al., 2019). Portugal had developed incentives for mini-producers up to a capacity of 250 kW, which targeted consumers or SMEs rather than energy communities.Regarding specific financing mechanisms, over the past two decades a varied suite of support schemes have been deployed to stimulate the sustainable energy transition (Stimulering van de Duurzaame Energie Transitie [SDE]). The first version of the SDE aimed to support the uptake of renewable energy by financing the difference between the average market price per kWh and the cost price of a comparable installation per kWh with a focus on biomass and wind energy projects. The SDE+, was put in place 2011 onwards to raise the financial efficiency of the subsidies to optimally support a diverse set of technologies (hydro, solar, geothermal, wind and biomass). Due to the focus on financial efficiency this support scheme preferred large-scale installations over the types that dominate energy community projects. From 2020 onwards, with the SDE++ the government further broadened the scope of support from renewable energy to any type of decarbonization project, which also includes carbon capture and storage and low-carbon hydrogen (IEA, 2020).This work was supported by the European Union's Horizon 20202 programme [grant agreement #: 837752 – NEWCOMERS project]. This work was supported by the European Union's Horizon 20202 programme [grant agreement #: 837752 – NEWCOMERS project].
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| European Union's Horizon 2020 | 20202, 837752 |
| Stimulering van de Duurzaame Energie Transitie | |
| Idaho State Department of Education | |
| European Commission |
Keywords
- Energy communities
- Energy governance
- Energy transition
- Polycentric governance
- Scaling