Approaches to Social Innovation in Positive Energy Districts (PEDs)—A Comparison of Norwegian Projects

Daniela Baer,Alenka Temeljotov-Salaj,Caroline Cheng,Annemie Wyckmans,Dirk Ahlers,Judith Thomsen,Bradley Loewen

doi:10.3390/su13137362

Daniela Baer, Alenka Temeljotov-Salaj + Show 5 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/su13137362

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Abstract

The Positive Energy District (PED) concept is a localized city and district level response to the challenges of greenhouse gas emission reduction and energy transition. With the Strategic Energy Transition (SET) Plan aiming to establish 100 PEDs by 2025 in Europe, a number of PED projects are emerging in the EU member states. While the energy transition is mainly focusing on technical innovations, social innovation is crucial to guarantee the uptake and deployment of PEDs in the built environment. We set the spotlight on Norway, which, to date, has three PED projects encompassing 12 PED demo sites in planning and early implementation stages, from which we extract approaches for social innovations and discuss how these learnings can contribute to further PED planning and implementation. We describe the respective approaches and learnings for social innovation of the three PED projects, ZEN, +CityxChange and syn.ikia, in a multiple case study approach. Through the comparison of these projects, we start to identify social innovation approaches with different scopes regarding citizen involvement, stakeholder interaction and capacity building. These insights are also expected to contribute to further planning and design of PED projects within local and regional networks (PEDs in Nordic countries) and contribute to international PED concept development.

Highlights

We investigated three projects with twelve Positive Energy District (PED) demo sites in Norway in a comparative case study, capturing the variety of approaches for social innovation so far
The results show that each of the PED projects balanced technological solutions as well as social innovations, but in a varied approach and scope with regard to citizen involvement, stakeholder interaction and capacity building
Due to the early stages of the projects and demo sites, we cannot yet evaluate specific results of these social innovation processes, but the set-up of how the three projects address social innovation allows us to extract an overview of the variety of practical approaches and the way context drives them

Summary

Introduction

Districts offer the appropriate arena for collaboration between different sectors and stakeholders in order to enable a holistic and inter-sectoral approach to energy planning as an integrative part of sustainable urban development [2,3]. As a point of departure, the body of work generated by European initiatives to define PEDs and shape frameworks and strategies for PED development and future implementation. ] that actively manage their energy consumption and the energy flow between them and the wider energy system” They have “an annual positive energy balance”, “are designed to be an integral part of the district/city energy system” and are “intrinsically scalable and [ . Urban design consultancies, energy forecasting and optimization solutions, real estate/facility management, research Role of Partners.

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