Abstract
Civic energy communities (CECs) have emerged throughout Europe in recent years, developing a range of activities to promote, generate, and manage renewable energy within the community. Building on theories of Social Practice, we develop the notion of Collective Energy Practice to account for the activity of CECs. This expands the practice-based understanding of energy, which thus far has mostly focused on energy practices of the home. Additionally, we build on earlier practice-based thinking to come to our understanding of a ‘system of energy practices’. This view places the collective energy practices of CECs in a broader mesh of sites of practice, including policymaking, commercial activity, and grid management. Taking account of the enabling and/or restricting the influence of this broad system of energy practices is crucial in understanding the development of CECs’ practices. We accomplish this through the qualitative analysis of our long-term empirical research of five Dutch CEC sites, but also draw on our earlier fieldwork on smart grid projects in the Netherlands.
Highlights
Civic Energy Communities (CECs) have been on the rise in many countries worldwide; in the Netherlands, CECs are showing steady growth since 2010
We will do this from a perspective that is based on theories of social practice and introduce a notion that—as we will argue—better captures the activities of CECs
The three categories of collective energy practices that CECs engage in are in quite different stages of development
Summary
Civic Energy Communities (CECs) have been on the rise in many countries worldwide; in the Netherlands, CECs are showing steady growth since 2010. We will identify the crucial interlinkages with this system of energy practices that explain the emergence of collective energy practices for CECs and how these have been hindered and/or enabled far By developing these two arguments, we address the following research question: how can we understand the emerging practices of civic energy communities within a changing energy system?. These innovations can be technical [13], CECs often work with existing products that are applied in new contexts, where non-technological aspects are the subject of innovation [3,14] We build on this body of literature, but from a different perspective: we approach the activities of CECs from the perspective of social practice theory, in which the actual activities through which energy is generated and managed are the central object of study. We close with a discussion regarding the collective energy practices of CECs within the energy system, by highlighting their empirical and theoretical relevance
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