Civic energy communities (CECs) have emerged throughout Europe in recent years, developing a range of activities to promote, generate, and manage renewable energy within the community. Building on theories of Social Practice, we develop the notion of Collective Energy Practice to account for the activity of CECs. This expands the practice-based understanding of energy, which thus far has mostly focused on energy practices of the home. Additionally, we build on earlier practice-based thinking to come to our understanding of a ‘system of energy practices’. This view places the collective energy practices of CECs in a broader mesh of sites of practice, including policymaking, commercial activity, and grid management. Taking account of the enabling and/or restricting the influence of this broad system of energy practices is crucial in understanding the development of CECs’ practices. We accomplish this through the qualitative analysis of our long-term empirical research of five Dutch CEC sites, but also draw on our earlier fieldwork on smart grid projects in the Netherlands.
Many academic approaches that claim to consider the broad set of social and ethical issues relevant to energy systems sit side-by-side without conversation. This paper considers three such literatures: Value Sensitive Design, Responsible Research and Innovation and the Energy Justice framework. We argue that whilst definitions of these concepts appear, on face value, to be united by a common normative goal -improving the social outcomes and mitigating sensitivities at the interface of technological energy systems and human livelihoods -, their existence in academic silos has obscured complementarities, which, once synthesized, might increase their overall academic and practical relevance. This paper fills the emergent gap of critically discussing the concepts and their strengths and challenges as well as how they could contribute to each other. It compares: (1) the things that they claim to tackle, (2) the solutions they claim to provide and (3) the points that clearly distinguish one approach from another (if any at all). Not only does this make this paper the first of its kind, but it also makes it an impactful one. With each concept gaining various degrees of support in academia and practice, our discussion reveals where tensions exist and where positive gains can be made. We identify five opportunities for collaboration and integration with implications for the achievement of energy systems that are acceptable from a societal and ethical perspective.
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