Energy Communities and the Tensions Between Neoliberalism and Communitarianism

Erik Laes,Gunter Bombaerts

doi:10.1007/s11948-021-00359-w

Abstract

The convergent development of (renewable) distributed electricity sources, storage technologies (e.g., batteries), ‘big data’ devices (e.g., sensors, smart meters), and novel ICT infrastructure matching energy supply and demand (smart grids) enables new local and collective forms of energy consumption and production. This socio-technical evolution has been accompanied by the development of citizen energy communities that have been supported by EU energy governance and directives, adopting a political narrative of placing the citizen central in the ongoing energy transition. But to what extent are the ideals that motivate the energy community movement compatible with those of neoliberalism that have guided EU energy policy for the last four decades? Using a framework inspired by Michel Foucault’s idea of governmentality, we analyze the two political forms from three dimensions: ontological, economic and power politics. For the ontological and the economic dimensions, neoliberal governmentality is flexible enough to accommodate the tensions raised by the communitarians. In the dimension of power politics however, the communitarian logic does raise a fundamental challenge to neoliberal governmentality in the sense that it explicitly aims for a redefinition of the ‘common good’ of society’s energy supply based on democratic premises.

Highlights

In recent years, the European Union (EU) has reconfirmed its objective of becoming a climate neutral economy by 2050, in line with the Paris agreement to keep global warming within 1.5–2.0 °C above pre-industrial levels.1 Especially for EU countries not relying on nuclear power, this implies that renewable energy will have to provide the bulk of their energy provision in 2050
Though a detailed taxonomy of the many shapes that energy community initiatives can take on is beyond the scope of the present paper – for this we refer the reader to e.g. Moroni et al (2019) and Sousa et al (2019) – in this discussion section we merely want to introduce and explore some important tensions that according to us will have to be navigated especially by energy community initiatives that wish to hold true to a communitarian logic in a context of neoliberal EU ‘clean energy’ governmentality
By drawing on Foucault’s conception of neoliberalism as a form of governmentality, we were able to show that something much more complex is at hand than a simple opposition of neoliberal and communitarian logics would suggest

Summary

Introduction

The European Union (EU) has reconfirmed its objective of becoming a climate neutral economy by 2050, in line with the Paris agreement to keep global warming within 1.5–2.0 °C above pre-industrial levels. Especially for EU countries not relying on nuclear power, this implies that renewable energy will have to provide the bulk of their energy provision in 2050. The “Clean Energy for All Europeans” legislative package (in short, clean energy package), composed of eight separate pieces of legislation (including REDII), emphasizes the need for more bottom-up initiatives and ‘energy democracy’ to further harness the potential of local energy communities (European Commission, 2019) This enthusiastic embrace of community energy in the official EU discourse and legislative framework seems odd due to the fundamental difference between the reality of the present EU energy market – formed by four decades of neoliberal EU energy policy (cf “Neoliberal EU energy governmentality”) resulting in a mainly centralized electricity production infrastructure owned and managed by a handful of energy multinationals (Engie, EDF, Eon, Vattenfall, etc.) – and the vision and practices advocated by the energy community movement following a communitarian logic – i.e., one of bottom-up democracy, citizen ownership and independence from traditional energy companies.. This enthusiastic embrace of community energy in the official EU discourse and legislative framework seems odd due to the fundamental difference between the reality of the present EU energy market – formed by four decades of neoliberal EU energy policy (cf. “Neoliberal EU energy governmentality”) resulting in a mainly centralized electricity production infrastructure owned and managed by a handful of energy multinationals (Engie, EDF, Eon, Vattenfall, etc.) – and the vision and practices advocated by the energy community movement following a communitarian logic – i.e., one of bottom-up democracy, citizen ownership and independence from traditional energy companies. While the tendency in the literature is to view the adoption of such socio-technical innovations in dualistic terms – i.e., they either contribute to a radical system transformation or to system reproduction (Wittmayer et al, 2021) – these extremes should be seen as the outer limits of a set of possible future energy system configurations involving a multitude of different interconnections between

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Discussion

Conclusion