Paper short abstract:

The paper portrays the entanglement of expectations and roles of the stakeholders involved in smart energy communities, arguing that a methodical engagement with issues of (citizen) knowledge, trust and empowerment is necessary to move beyond the transitionist narrative of citizen emancipation.

Paper long abstract:

The EU has framed energy communities (ECs) as collective actions of citizens that enable them to participate in the energy system, contribute to its decentralisation and propel the energy transition. While member countries are now actively coping with ECs’ legislative, technical, and market challenges, the prospect of their social and economic benefits goes largely unquestioned. In this paper, we contend that those benefits actually depend on a tangle of knowledge, trust and empowerment on the part of residents that stakeholders are far from extricating.

We build on qualitative research conducted within the H2020 NRG2peers project to show that the structural tensions in the design and execution of renewable energy ECs are both concealed and partially produced by the transitionsit narratives. Nine communities in diverse phases of maturity and form were involved in the study; however, we focus primarily on a Dutch and Slovenian case (a community-initiated, floating smart-grid urban neighbourhood and a project-initiated self-supply village community, respectively). We tease out the expectations of the different stakeholders involved in the implementation and management of the ECs, and argue that the diverging and converging expectations are both driving and obstructing the work of actually existing ‘transitions’. We conclude by making the case for a shift in the framework for the design of smart ECs, to better negotiate these expectations. By learning how to engage with residents’ values and needs, stakeholders can leave behind the transitionist narrative of citizen emancipation, while actually working to co-create meaningful, albeit iterative, improvements in specific localities.