Paper short abstract:

Collective self-consumption in France prompts exploration of a collective approach to sufficiency in the creation and functioning of local energy communities. Shared governance confronts ideals to the challenges of operationalisation, leading actors to reinterpret sufficiency as an operating concept

Paper long abstract:

While the development of renewable energies, particularly electricity, has done little to challenge the existing conventional system so far, local and collective initiatives are emerging with the aim of decentralising the system from the bottom. These initiatives, known as "energy communities", take a variety of forms specific to the local context in which they arise. In recent years, a new type of energy community has emerged in France called collective self-consumption (CSC), bringing together electric producers and consumers via the distribution network.

Adopting an STS perspective, our paper aims to investigate the way in which actors construct a collective approach to sufficiency as an operative concept in the creation and functioning of energy communities. By analyzing qualitative data from the past Eco-SESA and RETHINE and ongoing D-ACCEF research projects, we investigate two main phases of CSC operations: set-up and operation. While the set-up phase is characterized by the material and organisational construction of a collective approach to the sufficiency that is meant to support the project, the operation phase confronts this "intentional" approach with the challenges of operationalisation. Tensions between collective governance and individual consumption practices, the need to make the operation economically viable, changing regulations - these are just some of the factors that lead actors to reinterpret their approach to sufficiency not as an ideal, but as an empirical operating concept rooted in the materiality of spaces and actors’ practices. In this sense, the reinterpretation of a "situated" sufficiency enables communities to develop and envisage scaling-up trajectories.