Land Use as a Crucial Resource for Smart Grids—The ‘Common Good’ of Renewables in Distributed Energy Systems

Abstract

The energy transition involves transforming electricity supply systems. Smart grids are resilient, polycentric systems consisting of integrated, self-governed Microgrids including distributed energy systems (DES). Renewable energy requires high numbers and a huge variety of infrastructures, requiring large amounts of spaces, including land. Renewable energy flows and land are natural resources. This analysis applies Ostrom’s common pool resources (CPR) theory on the sustainable use of ecosystems and natural resources to explore DES as a “common good” with spaces and land as crucial scarce resources. Currently, electricity grids are monocultures with highly centralized and hierarchical governance structures, where the juxtaposition of electricity as public and private good is considered self-evident. The emergence of DES in smart Microgrids is disrupting these monocultures, which is one aspect of the full transformation from current centralized grids towards resilient, integrated Microgrids based on variety and adaptive capacity. The other component of the transformation concerns the essential resource of space. As land and other spaces, such as rooftops, are subject to diverse property regimes, CPR is also applicable for analyzing the required changes in property rights and land-use decision-making. Such changes are necessary to make sufficient space available for the infrastructures of community Microgrids.