How Much is Enough?: Redistributive Power for a Just Energy Transition

Abstract

One vision for the energy transition emphasises the importance of the wider democratisation and distribution of energy provisioning, grounded in large-scale energy demand reduction and greater engagement of civil society in the organisation, operation, and ownership of the energy system. In such a vision, energy communities hold potentional to intervene in the nature, dynamics, and distribution of power. Relating both to the discursive, political and social power of citizens within a society, as well as the energetic, electrical power contextualised by a global supply chain of biophysical resources to meet energy needs. An energy transition grounded in such local initaitives represents a redistribution of both these aspects of power. Nested within this potential for redistribution emphasises the potential for a bottom-up energy transition, characterised by a flourishing network of energy communities, to contribute towards energy justice and a just energy transition. Indeed, there are many seeming ovelaps between the conceptual basis of just transitions and local energy communities, however identifying strategies that can be adopted by local initiatives to support energy justice is a persisting challenge. Steered by the overarching question: how can community energy initiatives understand, actively reflect on, and engage with their contributions towards distributive energy justice? The research aims to support practitioners working within the energy community ecosystem to engage with contributions to energy justice. Guided a conceptual framework of distributive energy justice grounded in an attention towards capabilities, intesectionality, and spatiality. The framework is applied within three empirical case studies of energy commnunities located in the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Based on extensive and in-depth interviews with stakeholders within the energy community ecosystem, the research arrives at a question matrix designed to support local intiaitives in their active reflection and engagement with distributive energy justice. In doing so, the research arrives at an approach that builds on current scientific and academic understandings of needs, power, and multiple geographies within the energy system. Moreover, the dashboard tool seeks to facilitate practioners to ask critical questions of the various impacts that energy communities can have across environmental, economic, social, and technical impact categories.