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Paper short abstract

This paper compares strategies about anaerobic digestion deployment in Île-de-France. Whereas crossing scaling-up strategies accelerate AD spread at the risk of strengthen usual energy and agriculture regimes, deep-scaling strategies take more time but could allocate better costs and benefits.

Paper long abstract

This paper analyses the sociotechnical implications of different scalarity strategies (Laurent et Violle 2025) in the case of anaerobic digestion (AD) deployment in Seine-et-Marne (Île-de-France), region known as pioneer in France for introducing both intermediate energy crop and biomethane injection.

The data corpus, collected between 2017 and 2024, includes press articles, grey literature, around thirty interviews and the observation of several professional events.

First, emergence (around 2012) and spreading of intermediate energy crop biomethane and injection in Seine-et-Marne can be understood crossing several “scaling up strategies” developed by different stakeholders acting at different levels: renewable energy production objectives defined by community and national policies, greening gas supply at networks level, diversifying agriculture activities at sector and establishments levels, securing risk for public and private funding bodies.

Second, we point out that “deep scaling strategies” less impact AD deployment whereas they are public or private. Local planning doesn’t constraint project promoters. Projects dedicated to assemble diverse inputs take more time to coordinate and are fewer.

Finally, we discuss the sociopolitical implications of these two contrasted models. Whereas scaling up strategies tend to extend faster AD, it risks to strengthen energy and agricultural regime. Despite great financial and time resources needed, among alternative models, territorial approach could represent an opportunity to include a wider diversity of stakeholders, allocate costs and benefices more equitably and integrate additional concerns.

To conclude, sizing notion should be extended beyond production objectives, return on investment and units scale considering also costs and benefices allocation at several levels.