Local Energy Autonomy

Spaces, Scales, Politics

Fanny Lopez, Margot Pellegrino, Olivier Coutard, Fanny Lopez, Margot Pellegrino, Olivier Coutard

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781786301444
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119616252
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Energy

In recent years, interest for local energy production, supply and consumption has increased in academic and public debates. In particular, contemporary energy transition discourses and strategies often emphasize the search for increased local energy autonomy, a phrase which can refer to a diverse range of configurations, both in terms of the spaces and scales of the local territory considered and in terms of what is meant by energy autonomy.

This book explores policies, projects and processes aimed at increased local energy autonomy, with a particular focus on their spatial, infrastructural and political dimensions. In doing so, the authors – Sabine Barles, Bruno Barroca, Guilhem Blanchard, Benoit Boutaud, Arwen Colell, Gilles Debizet, Ariane Debourdeau, Laure Dobigny, Florian Dupont, Zélia Hampikian, Sylvy Jaglin, Allan Jones, Raphael Ménard, Alain Nadaï, Angela Pohlmann, Cyril Roger-Lacan, Eric Vidalenc – improve our understanding of the always partial and controversial processes of energy relocation that articulate forms of local metabolic self-sufficiency, socio-technical decentralization and political empowerment.

Comprising fifteen chapters, the book is divided into four parts: Governance and Actors; Urban Projects and Energy Systems; Energy Communities; and The Challenges of Energy Autonomy.

PART 1
Governance and Actors

1
Urban Planning and Energy: New Relationships, New Local Governance

The relationship between urban planning and energy dates back to the early stages of urbanization. However, in the last few decades, the development of energy systems, especially electricity and gas systems, has followed a specific technical logic, which revolves around extensive production and transport infrastructure on a larger scale. The relationship between energy and urban planning merely consisted in adjusting their technical development path to the urban fabric, public space and other construction constraints. This was certainly not the case for district heating grids that were, from the start, correlated with an urban project, even in the centralized models that marked their development between the 1960s and the 1980s. However, this relationship remained related to some simple and unequivocal equations, and the urban and built environment was treated as the offtaker of an energy that was produced outside of it.

This situation, which prevailed during most of the 20th Century without major changes, is currently undergoing a radical transformation due to the emergence of new local energy systems. Local communities become the crucible that enables the deployment of a new type of energy intelligence, an intelligence that sets two concrete dynamics in motion and makes them coherent.

The first of these dynamics concerns the energies themselves, the standardization of their production and uses, as well as their control and efficiency. It combines two sets of possibilities: on the one hand, the development of the resources of an area – the unavoidable energy waste and recoverable energy, the unused production potentials, all the renewable energy resources – and, on the other hand, the progressive re-engineering and efficiency improvements of their various uses.

The second dynamic is the need to link this energy intelligence more closely to the design and management of other policies: urban planning, land use, waste, housing, transport and intelligent mobility in particular. In order to progress in depth in the energetic field, it is necessary to connect it to these other policies, requiring renewed and strengthened local public governance.

The purpose of the following considerations is to briefly shed light on how the relationship between energy and urban planning is changing, and to understand the implications of such a change.

While the distribution of energy in all its components has already created a set of new challenges for those who plan and develop cities and land use, a second stage in this transformation has already started, initiating a new logic where urban development and local energy systems jointly arise from a common origin, and are part of a process of joint transformation.

Distributed energy is understood as the production of energy in a neighborhood, a group of buildings or a single apartment block; but it also includes the multiple possibilities of district energy exchanges in the subsystems which distribute the energy produced in a decentralized way, especially when buildings and networks are equipped with active and controlled demand systems. We can also include here the new uses of energy that develop alongside this transformation, such as electromobility.

The impact of this transformation on the institutions that run and manage cities, and those that design and operate energy systems, is manifold and engages new actors alongside the old ones. We will briefly try to list some of the issues that all those involved will have to solve together through a governance system that will have to be almost completely reinvented.

1.1. Distributed energy: the constant adaptation of urban areas

The possibility of using distributed energy systems is likely to have profound effects on urban planning and development. These effects are at first discrete but, at different stages, will modify a wide variety of parameters and approaches.

To fully understand the subject, the direct effects of these new urban planning possibilities must be considered – the integration of decentralized production in land-use planning or local building standards, for example – but also the indirect and systemic effects that are more difficult to foresee. As an example, let us note that an increase in the degree of energy autonomy of buildings can have opposite effects: reduce the networks’ pressure in the design of the urban fabric and thus, at first glance, lead to more isolated constructions; or, in the opposite sense, favor the emergence of small thermal networks, combining heat and cold, enabling energy exchanges and using storage components, which go hand in hand with a denser urban planning and increased community management, which allows economic models for these networks to appear, in connection with new lifestyles. These effects are therefore not unequivocal.

Once this clarification has been made, at least four main types of distributed energy effects can be distinguished in urban planning and construction.

First, the development of distributed energies leads to many changes regarding land use, creates new nuisances in inhabited areas (but can reduce them in other areas) and changes building standards. It therefore imposes multiple adaptations in terms of urban planning and land use.

The early integration of renewable energies into urban planning is both an urbanistic constraint and a condition for the efficient development of renewable energies. It concerns the sites and land reserved for the different installations, but also construction modes that favor “highly” distributed energy, such as rooftop photovoltaic installations or solar canopies, solar thermal heating or micro-cogeneration at the building level.

Beyond the technical adaptations of many urban planning documents, the question raised by these developments is twofold.

On the one hand, the determination in all European countries to promote more resilient local energy systems, based especially on the development of local and carbon-free energies, is pushing local actors, and the organizing authorities in particular, to take over the issue and act in common projects. The German renewable energy generation fleet, which exceeds 80 GW installed and is potentially 1.5 times the size of the French nuclear fleet, is owned by over 50% by local actors: citizen cooperatives, local investment firms created by small companies, farmers, etc. These collective grassroots commitments, the degree of which varies from one country to another, clearly resonate with the desire to develop renewable energies. In Denmark, the development of wind energy, on an unequaled scale in Europe, has mainly been based since the 1980s on the obligation to offer local communities and their citizens the opportunity to invest in the different projects.

On the other hand, the decisions that mark the development of renewable energies, whether regarding urban planning or the environment, are now part of an “environmental democracy” development context, based on the principle of public participation in decisions affecting the environment, a long-standing part of the European legal order (“Plans and Programs” Directive, Aarhus Convention), and constitutionalized in France by Article 7 of the Environmental Charter. This legal environment, and the resulting change in mentality that it conveys, slows down and complicates project development, both due to the consultations that it requires and the subsequent opportunities for litigation it can lead to. In France, as demonstrated by the changes back and forth that have affected the legal regime of wind energy, it has been difficult to find the right balance regarding this matter¹.

Similar legislations will therefore have different impacts depending on the location and context, and on whether local stakeholders participate in the energy development within the region, the two situations at times arising at once. The paradox over the last few years in most European countries has been that increased cooperation of local communities in the development of distributed energies, expressing their desire to participate as much as possible in these new forms of energy production for territorial development and new forms of urban development and exploitation of local resources, has not, however, helped to prevent the increasing resistance faced by many projects, particularly those regarding wind energy. On the other hand, as will be seen later, the projects focusing on thermal energy and district heating and cooling grids have found new momentum in this interdependent relationship with urban planning.

Second, energy becomes a new component of urban development and planning models.

As an example, the conversion of military or industrial wasteland includes, often as a priority, the production of renewable energies: some of the largest solar power plants in France...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• PART 1: Governance and Actors
• PART 2: Urban Projects and Energy Systems
• PART 3: Energy Communities
• PART 4: The Challenges of Energy Autonomy
• List of Authors
• Index
• End User License Agreement