Energy communities as three-dimensional hybrid forums for exploring, governing and implementing energy transition
Résumé
Energy transition is made of multiple technological transformations and is complicated by the related socio-technical controversies. In France, the diversity of actors willing to take part in the energy transition increases since two decades. Community renewable energy (CRE) is developing and is allowing citizens to take part in both funding, governance and development of energy projects. Thus, through CRE citizens can take part in innovation related to energy systems. The communities operate at the boundary of the energy industry, political debates and science. Considering energy as a common, energy communities claim for bringing back energy to the citizens' control challenging the tradionally centralized state-based approach. This paper is part of PhD research which aims to contribute to the understanding of how the civil society deals with the energy transition challenges. Through grounded research and mainly semioriented interviews of members and partners of three french energy communities we investigate how citizens make their own question socio-technical matters related to the production of renewable energy and how they interacts with both academical, political and economical actors. We found out that through their principal activity-energy production-energy communities are involved in different ways and at different levels in research and innovation programs both locally and nationally. They contribute to the exploration of socio-political and technical possibilities regarding the implementation of the energy transition. We propose to use the dialogic space of hybrid forums completed by an entrepeneurship dimension to analyse the development and the sustainability of energy communities.