According to a short article (or rather a “viewpoint”) published in Energy Policy last year (Walker and Devine-Wright, 2008), the term “community renewables” has recently been incorporated heavily in the UK’s energy policy. The term, they claim, echoes advocacy of local, small-scale and collective energy generation advocated by 1970s alternative technology activists in their heyday. This is seen as a significant change in UK energy policy, a move away from the dominance of large-scale centralized technical systems.

In Norway we seem to be experiencing a similar trend. We are reluctant to build more large-scale hydroelectric powerplants, we are skeptical towards other highly centralized solutions (e.g nuclear power) and many speak of distributed energy solutions as the next big thing. Walker and Divine-Wright points out, however, that just because an energy-solution is small and located closer to (some of) the user(s), this does not make it a  “community”-project.

To separate community projects from “other” types of projects, the authors construct a very simple tool, a four-by-four table [1] consisting of two axes. One axis describes the process of energy generation (central questions: who developed the project, who runs the project), the other describes the outcome (who benefits from it). The process-axis ranges from “closed and institutional” to “open and participatory” while the outcome axis stretches from”distant and private” to “local and collective”.

With this in mind we can conduct case studies, and projects can be categorized according to where they fit in the scheme. The most ideal-typical “community renewables”- projects would be placed at the top-right. The authors suggests a number of benefits related to implementing schemes like these. A typical non-community scheme would be a utility developed wind-farm with minimal direct involvement of local people, developed by a distant, closed institution, generating energy for the national grid, producing economic rewards for distant shareholders

Their research suggests that community projects could contribute to acceptance and support for renewable energy more generally, affecting what the authors call “the heart and minds” of locals, while non-community projects might, in the worst cases, lead to alienation and resistance towards the project and worse, towards renewables in general. On the downside, of course, community-projects are rarely large enough to have serious impacts on emission reductions.

Their framework is hardly revolutionary, but I think it’s a nice and very practical way to conceptualize differences between different projects, schemes and companies along some dimensions that are probably fruitful also in the Norwegian setting. Whether or not their (preliminary)  conclusions about the up- and downsides of community renewables  are valid in Norway, however,  remains to be seen..

[1] The guilty pleasure and wet dream of any sociologist..

When talking to companies in the bioenergy business, I have come across something which by many is perceived as unfair – personally I haven’t made up my mind yet. Basically the problem is this. Most bioenergy customers in Norway are public actors, often  municipalities who replace heating systems in public buildings. For the companies providing this service there are two basic approaches to this type of customer.

1) Wait for the municipality to invite tender for the service

or

2) Actively seek out the municipality with a sales pitch and try to convince them about the glories of green heat.

Now, the businesses doing this must keep in mind that every time a municipality wants to make an investment larger than 500 000 NOK, possible tenders must be invited to an open tender process. This poses problems for the businesses who follow the second approach. Basically they go out, pitch the idea, draft an agreement, make calculations and come up with an offer, and if the municipality agree to the terms, they have not yet made a sale – they have only won the possibility to compete for the deal.

From a market point of view I guess this makes sense, if we believe the doctrine “competition = good” (and it might be in this case, I’m not sure). The process becomes more transparent, you have more alternatives on the table, the price might be squeezed (and so on and so forth). It does, however, create a kind of classic free-rider problem. I have heard many stories about companies always sitting on the fence, waiting for the “pitchers” to do their job, and once they have – simply adjust their calculations so that you can come up with a better deal.

That being said, the “pitchers” do win from time to time, and we probably shouldn’t underestimate the power of human contact and the ability to build relations and trust. Still, I wonder if this makes the “pitchers” more reluctant and cautious, ultimately slowing down the process of switching from for example highly pollutant oil. Not sure, though.

Last week I attended the 15th annual sustainable development research conference in Utrecht, Holland. The delegates at the conference seemed to be a nice blend of various types of social scientists, (ranging from hardcore economic modellers to very qualitatively oriented anthropologists), as well as a few technically minded researchers and some consultants and others in the miscellaneous category. All had in common that their work and/or research in some way or another was related to the concept of sustainable development, and the conference motto: “Taking up the Global Challenge: Analysing the implementation of innovations and governance for sustainable development“.

The conference had an impressive lineup when it came to plenary speakers. Most notably, I guess, Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri, head of the IPCC addressed the audience via satellite from India. His main points where not very different from those he made when I saw him speak in Copenhagen a few months ago. In addition to giving a general overview on the current state of climate science (as the IPCC sees it) and what we as individuals and societies should change (hint: meat is murder…), he announced that the IPCC would have it’s 5th assessment report ready by 2014 (..so don’t hold your breath). He also spoke a bit in general about TERI, a research institute he is heavily involved in, and played a video (as he did in Copenhagen) on their “lighting a billion lives project” (good project, pretty cheesy video, though).

Other plenary speakers included Dutch minister of the environment, Jacqueline Cramer, who interestingly discussed the relationship between humans and nature. Her main point was that we needed to find the right balance between “People, planet and profit”. This balance we would find, she suspected, if we take a “third way”, crafting a society where we both regulate and harvest the powers of the markets. Not very controversial, but good talk.

Another interesting keynote was given by Tariq Banuri from the UN division for sustainable development. One of his points was that if we looked at the world today as one nation – “Earthland” – it would actually be the one nation in the world where different types of wealth is most unevenly distributed. Earthland, he claimed, would in fact be a less fair place than for example South-Africa under apartheid. He had the numbers to back this up, too..

One of the themes of the conference was “climate change and energy”, a theme with three track sessions, one of which I presented in (in the track “impacts of large scale implications of biomass for energy”). On the first day of the conference I followed a track entitled “strategies for mitigating climate change and emissions trading”. The temperature of the session was extremely high [1]. One of the presenters was Phillip Vergragt, a pretty experienced fellow, very much inspired by STS, it seemed. He gave a presentation on carbon capture and storage (CCS), arguing that it was basically a niche aimed at perpetuating the old carbon regime, and that it would probably lead to what he labeled “enhanced carbon lock-in”. In other words: not good. This approach seemed to take parts of the audience by surprise, and a number of them were extremely infuriated by his provocative “unscientific slander”. It was really an excellent presentation, though.

Another session I found very interesting was one dealing with “long term change towards sustainable societies: scenarios, forecasting and backcasting”. The session was dominated by quantitatively oriented economists in the business of making energy scenarios for the future. It was all very impressive, but they all had a common complaint; they did not know how to quantify things like policies, behavioral change and public perception of energy technologies in good ways. I guess that means there is still work for us  qualitative-heads, then..

In-between these sessions I managed to catch various snippets of other things. Talks on law, someone arguing for the precautionary principle, discussions on innovation.. most of it pretty interesting, although the quality was variable. On the third day my focus was directed towards my own session. The night before and the morning of my presentation I was extremely nervous, but I think I managed pretty ok. I got some useful feedback and some nice comments, so I’m fairly happy. The session was, however, perhaps not the most fitting for my presentation – although it was related to the use of biomass for energy. The other people in the session were all pretty quantitatively oriented, either doing life cycle analysis, or assessments of the “sustainability” of various types of bioenergy in different localities.

So is biomass for energy a sustainable approach you ask? The answer seems to be very dependent on the local context and the case in question, so there is no easy “yes” available to sell to the policy makers, and in quite a few cases the answer seems to be a definite “no”.

All in all I realy enjoyed the conference. Utrecht was a nice place, and there were many interesting sessions. I might return in more detail with something related to specific presentations later, but for now this will suffice.

[1] Literally, as well as academically. While the temperature in the room was close to 40 degrees Celsius, some of the debates were extremely heated.