Socio-technical Energy Transitions Research Articles

Transformational innovation in home energy: How developers imagine and engage with future residents of low carbon homes in the United Kingdom

Decarbonisation and climate change targets require multiscale sociotechnical energy transitions that include significant changes to housing stock. In the UK, the development of Active Buildings, which directly seek to be efficient energy producers, have zero carbon emissions and provide grid flexibility, has the potential to make a significant contribution to meeting these targets. Active Homes as a particular type of Active Building represent a potentially transformational innovation by altering how energy is produced, distributed and consumed, in addition to how homes are designed, constructed and then lived in. In this paper we draw on insights from qualitative interviews with stakeholders involved in the development of different Active Homes to consider motivations for development, and their views on how residents will reside in and interact with the homes. We highlight a potential conflict between a desire to prioritise the needs of residents with a belief amongst some that to do so, user engagement with technology should be minimised. This has implications for design decisions, which in turn influence how residents experience and live within the homes. In illuminating these narratives, we indicate the necessity of ongoing engagement with residents to understand how Active Homes – with particular emphasis on the operation and control of technologies – are experienced, in order to inform the successful rollout of current and future developments.

Implications of digitalization in facilitating socio-technical energy transitions in Europe

The energy sector is digitalizing - we see a lot of smart energy services providing higher value to customers through data processing, which also increases the importance of transparency and security of data access and processing. Nevertheless, the widespread use of these services is lagging behind for enabling fundamental transitions of energy systems. This interdisciplinary article operationalises the MLP of sustainability transitions and draws together previous research on the application and implications of energy data and consumer motivation for analysing the imbalance between the supply and demand of smart energy services in the current energy transition. Besides drawing together the opportunities and challenges with energy data of 85 international smart energy services, the empirical findings present some new energy data use cases aimed especially for consumers and provide an extensive overview of additional data types with reasoning needed by service providers. These findings are complemented with the more in-depth Estonian electricity sector digitalization case study. Furthermore, we propose a list of characteristics essential for Pan-European energy data access with the main aim to open up data, activate consumers and increase the demand of smart energy services for speeding up the green energy transition.

Energy inequality as a risk in socio-technical energy transitions: The Swedish case of individual metering and billing of energy for heating

Improved energy efficiency in the housing stock is an important undertaking in the energy transition but is associated with both opportunities and risks. While there are possibilities to reduce energy inequalities in the housing stock, inequalities also risk being aggravated as actions for energy efficiency usually aim at the least energy efficient—and thus sometimes the least privileged—parts of the housing stock. In this paper, we use two different energy performance metrics (kWh/m2 and kWh/capita) to investigate the energy inequality in the Swedish multifamily building stock and explore the effects of these inequalities in the energy transition. More specifically, we investigate the implementation of individual metering and billing of energy for heating, which was recently implemented in the least energy efficient part of the housing stock. It was found that low-income households were overrepresented in the affected buildings. The consequence of this implementation is thus that the strongest protection against energy poverty in Sweden (collective billing for heating) is removed in a part of the housing stock where two of the predictors for energy poverty—low income and low energy performance—are overrepresented. It was concluded that acknowledging inequalities is crucial to avoid risks associated with the energy transition.

Conceptualising government-market dynamics in socio-technical energy transitions: A comparative case study of smart grid developments in China and Japan

Smart grids (SGs) have been increasingly regarded as an enabling technology for post-Fukushima energy transitions. SGs require new policies and market infrastructures to deliver their potential, but the roles of governments in increasingly market based energy systems have not been well conceptualised. Advancing the socio-technical energy transitions literature, this paper proposes five functions of government-market dynamics in an integrated framework, and applies the framework in the field of smart grid developments in two Asian countries, China and Japan. Based on interviews with 38 key stakeholders, this study has three main findings. First, both countries have in common that the five functions of government-market dynamics are critical in developing, diffusing and utilising SG technologies. Second, China and Japan exhibit distinctive characteristics in the ways that government actors engage market actors. While the Chinese approach is more hierarchical, fragmented and homogenous led by two monopolised grid companies, the Japanese approach is a relatively systemic, bottom-up, and heterogeneous system mainly operated through four large-scale SG demonstration projects. Third, national contextual differences, most notably the advancement of electricity market reforms, explain the variety of the dynamics and outcomes. This paper concludes that consideration of optimising government-market dynamics is vital to create conductive conditions for realising the potential that SGs can offer in energy transitions.

Take me to your leader: Using socio-technical energy transitions (STET) modelling to explore the role of actors in decarbonisation pathways

Quantitative modelling analysis in support of national and global decarbonisation pathways has never been more important to achieving global climate stabilisation in line with the Paris Agreement. However, established equilibrium and optimisation models tend to radically simplify their depiction of societal and political/institutional actors. This can make them difficult to use for implementing specific energy and climate policies in the near term and aligning these with long term targets. Most energy systems analysis continues to pair such techno-economic models with entirely qualitative narratives about future political and societal developments. The result is that these critical factors often fade into the background in subsequent discourse. In this paper, we utilise BLUE – a leading socio-technical energy transition (STET) model of the United Kingdom’s (UK) energy system – to capture elements of the heterogeneity, consistency and co-evolution of societal and political drivers. We focus specifically on exploring government-led and societally-led energy transitions and investigating the differences in their decarbonisation pathways and end states. Our modelling exercise finds that it is not who leads per se that is the most critical, but rather the level of the initial effort and subsequent commitment from both leader and follower actors that appears to regulate the pace at which decarbonisation pathways unfold. However, systemic inertia in all cases means that the deepest decarbonisation targets continue to appear very difficult to achieve.

Community solar energy initiatives in urban energy transitions: A comparative study of Foshan, China and Seoul, South Korea

Urban community solar energy initiatives have flourished around the world, suggesting that community energy can be an important pathway for energy transitions. The deployment of solar energy has however remained limited. The complexity of these community-level transition processes has not been well understood and conceptualised. By advancing studies on community energy and socio-technical energy transitions, this paper proposes an integrated framework to conceptualise community-level energy initiatives from a systemic perspective. The framework builds the linkages among five critical processes and their associated contexts and outcomes, and is applied in a comparative study of two cities in Asia: Foshan and Seoul. Based on 19 semi-structured interviews in the case cities, this study has three major findings. First, the two cities’ solarisation pathways exhibited similarities as well as differences that could be understood within our conceptual framework. Second, distinctive modes of community solarisation can be identified in the two cities. Foshan was a mixed mode which was characterised by a combination of top-down, state-led and entrepreneur-driven approaches, whereas Seoul developed a bottom-up grassroot-driven transition. Third, the actual impacts of community solarisation on regime shifts appeared to be very modest, but we identify important reinforcing effects between some processes and local contextual factors. This paper concludes that community energy can play an important role in urban energy transitions, but that sufficient policy attention must be given to complex interactions in the critical processes.

Can Energy Democracy Thrive in a Non-democracy?

This paper argues that energy democracy could manifest in terms of public engagement at the community level, free of state intervention, government fostering, and donor support, even in locations where governments have been in flux from a democracy to a non-democracy. In currently non-democratic Thailand, for example, public engagement on community energy transitions had occurred, were sustained, and proved to be durable over time. The spaces of deliberation, created and nurtured by Thai citizens in this community, had become effective sites for navigating and negotiating the ebbs and flows of democratically organized sociotechnical energy transitions. This paper further argues that these spaces for public engagement had revealed that energy democracy is collective, cultural, consequential, co-produced, co-existent, and critical phenomenon that can be used to shore up an energy democracy framework.

Politicizing energy justice and energy system transitions: Fossil fuel divestment and a “just transition”

The burgeoning energy justice scholarship highlights the importance of justice and equity concerns in the context of global decarbonization and the transition to a green economy. This paper seeks to extend current conceptualizations of energy justice across entire energy lifecycles, from extraction to final use, to offer an analytically richer and more accurate picture of the (in)justice impacts of energy policy decisions. We identify two key areas that require greater attention and scrutiny in order to enact energy justice within a more democratized energy system. First, we call for greater recognition of the politics, power dynamics and political economy of socio-technical energy transitions. We use the example of the fossil fuel divestment movement as a way to shift energy justice policy attention upstream to focus on the under-researched injustices relating to supply-side climate policy analysis and decisions. Second, the idea of a “just transition” and the distributional impacts on “and the role of” labor in low-carbon transitions must be addressed more systematically. This focus produces a more directly political and politicizing framing of energy (in)justice and a just energy transition.