Community-scale Energy Research Articles

Some things old, some things new: The spatial representations and politics of change of the peak oil relocalisation movement

Despite continued uncertainty about the physical realities and political, economic and social implications of peak oil, combined concerns about oil scarcity, climate change and globalisation has spawned an energetic relocalisation movement dedicated to achieving a comprehensive reduction in oil dependency through community-scale initiatives. This paper uses a discourse approach to examine the emergence, geographical spread and practices of the Transition Network, a UK-originated relocalisation movement now involving 186 local initiatives in the UK and other countries. We trace the movement’s drawing upon, and innovation from, discourses and techniques used by other grassroots environmental movements to promote a spatial representation of peak oil as an inevitable and geographically undiscriminating problem, and its use of addiction metaphors and participatory techniques to promote personal and community-scale energy descent initiatives as a viable and necessary alternative to globalisation. We also analyse the spatial representations and techniques used in the Network’s “rhizomic” spread across multiple localities around the world and embedding in communities where relocalisation initiatives are established. We conclude by examining the future challenges these spatial constructions of peak oil pose for the relocalisation movement.

Inexact Community-Scale Energy Systems Planning Model

Energy systems planning models are useful for supporting decisions of urban energy systems planning and environmental management. The previous studies on energy systems modeling were too aggregated to reach insight into the interactive characteristics of energy-related activities at a community level, and thus were unable to address the unique environmental and economic features associated with community-scale energy management systems. In addition, they could hardly deal with multiple uncertainties expressed as interval values and probabilistic distributions. Therefore, the objective of this study is to develop an interval-parameter chance-constraint community-scale energy systems planning model (IPC-CEM) for supporting energy and environmental systems management under uncertainty. IPC-CEM will then be applied to the planning of a community-scale energy system to demonstrate its applicability. The results indicated that the developed model had advantages in reflecting complexities of various uncertainties as well as dealing with problems of urban infrastructure development and greenhouse gas-emission management within community-scale energy management systems.