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This conceptual paper applies a mobilization model to Collective Action Initiatives (CAIs) in the energy sector. The goal is to synthesize aspects of sustainable transition theories with social movement theory to gain insights into how CAIs mobilize to bring about niche-regime change in the context of the sustainable energy transition. First, we demonstrate how energy communities, as a representation of CAIs, relate to social innovation. We then discuss how CAIs in the energy sector are understood within both sustainability transition theory and institutional dynamics theory. While these theories are adept at describing the role energy CAIs have in the energy transition, they do not yet offer much insight concerning the underlying social dimensions for the formation and upscaling of energy CAIs. Therefore, we adapt and apply a mobilization model to gain insight into the dimensions of mobilization and upscaling of CAIs in the energy sector. By doing so we show that the expanding role of CAIs in the energy sector is a function of their power acquisition through mobilization processes. We conclude with a look at future opportunities and challenges of CAIs in the energy transition.

Households are increasingly the centre of attention in smart grid experiments, where they are dominantly framed in a role as ‘flexible consumers’ of electricity. This paper reports from the Danish smart grid demonstration project eFlex, which aimed to investigate the ‘flexibility potential’ of households, and it shows how householders are far from just ‘consumers’ in the system. Drawing on empirical material from ethnographic fieldwork in 49 households that tested smart grid equipment, the paper firstly demonstrates how eFlex users were also creative innovators. Secondly, by integrating user innovation literature, domestication theory and practice theory, the paper illustrates how the eFlex equipment interacted with a variety of collectively shared everyday practices in the household and argues that this unique family context accordingly had implications for the ‘innovative capacity’ of these pioneer users. The paper thus calls for smart grid stakeholders to begin taking the ‘innovator role’ of smart home users seriously, but equally calls for a more contextual and situated perspective when involving innovative users – their families have an equal part to play in the development of the smart grid.

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