Abstract
New decentralized energy-generation technologies have turned economies of scale upside down while becoming more economically viable. At the same time, the increased penetration of information technologies has led to new opportunities to manage infrastructure in a less hierarchical, more flexible way. Together with citizen demands for control over energy, these two converging trends has put energy communities (ECs) on the agenda, potentially advancing the transition towards more sustainable energy systems, despite hindrances encountered on the way. This paper presents a case study of the planning process of a sustainable city district in Sweden, using participatory observations and interviews conducted with included stakeholders. We analyse how the included stakeholders has reasoned about establishing a sustainable energy system in the area, including a microgrid. The discussions on a microgrid comprised two parallel discourses, coexisting but seldomly explicitly confronted. The distribution system operator in the area promoted a distributed energy system (DES) solution, while the property developers opted for a microgrid organized more as a citizen energy community (CEC). We discuss why the CEC proponents so far has lost the battle of creating a community owned smart grid. We conclude that the different models, a DES and a CEC, comprise different values and an increased focus on energy communities could shift the transition pathway towards a more decentralized system involving other prioritise than just economical.
Highlights
The energy system is transitioning to become more sustainable
Decentralized renewable energy systems are being promoted by the European Union (EU)
The reason for the comparison is to highlight that even though they share many similarities the concepts include differences that will lead to rather different pathways depending of if a distributed energy system (DES) or a Energy Community (EC) is chosen as a unit of organisaiton
Summary
The energy system is transitioning to become more sustainable. One trend is for large-scale, centralized, and fossilfuelled systems to change to the small-scale production of renewables, with implications for the ownership and operation of energy systems [1]. The EU supports decentralized energy systems because they have multiple benefits, such as increased local production, energy supply security, and reduced transmission losses ([3] of the European Parliament and of the Council Rec. 65) These technical changes, with e.g. more PV and wind power, are related to and dependent on accompanying changes in actors and institutions [4, 5]. Another trend is for citizens to start demanding control ever energy production by establishing local community-owned renewable energy installations, such as solar power plants [6]. Before going in more in depth to how the analysis will be done, an overview of ECs and DESes will be given Fig. 1
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