This project will deliver a ‘governance roadmap’ towards various types of community-based local sustainable energy systems, plus insight in stakeholder positions, opportunities and limitations.

Community-based, local sustainable energy systems may play a transformative role in creating a sustainable, inclusive society. The project investigates how local energy innovations can be developed and implemented in a way that optimises their transformative effect. The project focuses on giving people more influence in shaping their energy use and supply as part of a sustainable society.

The project consists of three interrelated parts:

1. Comparative and historical analysis of local energy cooperatives;
2. Analysis of energy innovations that support relative autonomy of local energy systems, focusing on two new technologies to store energy (necessary to match supply and demand at different moments in time);
3. Scenario study of sustainable energy systems with varied socio-technical configurations, addressing (de)centrality and the value of autonomy.

Local energy cooperatives

The researcher team studies the innovative role of local energy cooperatives and other local initiative in the sustainable energy transition. During the first year of the project, the researchers started to study six Dutch local initiatives which are involved in socio-technological innovations. Buurtzon Arnhem is a local start-up that works together with a housing corporation and cooperatives to enable residents of social housing to get solar energy from panels on their buildings. Duurzaam Hoonhorst is an energy cooperative with a broad sustainability goal, carrying out projects enhancing social, economic and ecological sustainability of the municipality. Examples of projects are a biomass heater and  circular economy inspired waste management.  Windpark Nijmegen-Betuwe is a cooperation of green-minded citizens of Nijmegen and its surroundings, working on the development of a community benefit fund for the residents of the area near the wind turbines. The other three initiatives are Zonnecollectief Overbetuwe, Solar Greenpoint De Veluwe Eerbeek and Lingewaard Energie.

The research aims at the kind of technologies cooperatives choose and how their involvement affects these technologies. The researchers explored requirements for community-initiated renewable energy innovations, paying special attention to the ways the social and the technical are at interplay in these innovation processes:

• Social innovations are for example a community benefit scheme, or a lease-purchase construction for solar panels;
• Technical innovations are for example floating, rotating solar panels, and an integrated system for heat, solar and wind).

A first result is that these community-initiated innovations seem to flourish through careful alignment and stabilisation work by citizens groups developing solutions with a potential to carry far beyond the local context. Supportive attitudes and flexibility, climate policies, and financial support from local and regional governments play a major role in enabling these types of innovations.

In the next stages of the project the researchers will continue to follow these projects and compare them with examples from Germany, Denmark, Austria and Scotland. In addition the role and potential of Dutch collectives in the management of common goods in the past will be studied, taking the work of Nobel prize winner Elinor Ostrom as starting point.

Energy innovations

The second part of the project concentrates on use and articulation (technical, demand and political) of local energy storage technologies and smart micro grids for and by local energy. The project will concentrate on two promising Dutch energy storage innovations:

• The seasalt battery of Dr Ten. The seasalt battery promises a sustainable, clean, and relatively cheap storage of electricity produced by renewable sources during the day. This system can be applied on the level of households.
• The heat storage system of Ecovat. Ecovat stores heat in the summer that can be retrieved in wintertime. This storage system functions at the level of neighborhoods.

Both new storage technologies are currently developed at the level of working prototypes. Both companies hope to implement their technology soon.

In addition the researchers also started a study on the potential of Energy Service Companies (ESCOs) as a potential appropriate social-economic environment for Ecovat. Because of the changing policy of one of the valorisation partners, Cogas, the researchers also decided to add a project on Biogas to their analysis. This biogas project will be developed by farmers, Cogas and citizens.

energy cooperatives, local energy systems, common goods, community-based energy, community-based energy, governance, local energy storage, scenario study, energy transition, renewable energy, community innovation

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