Making Compatible Energy Planning with Urban Decision-Making: Socio-Energy Nodes and Local Configuration

Abstract

This communication will develop a specific concept, the socio-energetic node (SEN), to help understand energy assemblages in urban spaces. The SEN concept broadens the scope of planning to urban-energy interaction, the better to understand three main points. First, it informs questions about how to upgrade large energy networks and hybridize them with self-sufficient energy loops. Second, it reveals elements of energy socio-technical regimes that stimulate or hamper urban energy transition. Lastly, it aims to provide support for energy planners when modelling multi-actor energy systems. We therefore emphasize the importance of qualifying relationships between energy and urban-planning stakeholders and propose a method for implementing -and reconsidering -energy planning in cities, by breaking energy systems down into SENs and by studying how they "plug into" geographic configurations.

Social sciences introduction. Local energy communities

“…It ranges from the desire for autonomy, which gives rise to citizen projects that claim locality as an instrument of sustainability (Brusadelli, Lemay and Martell, 2016), to the use of the energy community as a tool in the discussion around urban production (Aubert, 2020;Ramirez-Cobo, Tribout and Debizet, 2021). This pooling of actors around energy consumption and production reinterprets not only space as a place to locate energy devices but also locality as a set of values (Herault-Fournier, Merle and Prigent-Simonin, 2012; Martin and Upham, 2016;Perlaviciute et al, 2018), such as the traceability of energy, the exit from large distribution infrastructures or the geographical proximity between producers and consumers (Debizet and Tabourdeau, 2017;Tabourdeau and Debizet, 2017).…”