Toward a state-led, market-enabled commons
Positioning urban civic energy in East Asia
Chihsin Chiu (National Taiwan University)
What is community energy? What does green energy have anything to do with local places, democracy and common goods? How do lay people contribute to the production and the distribution of solar energy?
These may be some usual questions coming to people’s minds whenever group solar or collective power campaigns pop up on the press or in the forums. Community energy is a type of community-owned, -financed, and -operated renewable energy supply in the form of a project or program initiated by a group of people united by a place, a neighborhood, and/or a set of common interests.
Ideally, community energy embodies energy democracy principles, be it a suburban solar energy co-op, a village-based hydropower collective, or a public-private partnership of wind turbine owners, giving voices to civic participation. This is because a well-managed community energy program can generate electricity savings as leverage for various grassroots programs for local low-income communities and promote environmental activism. Among different formats, energy cooperatives are the major form of civic energy groups organizing and managing such programs.
Membership-based energy cooperatives have also raised concern, as they can exclude economically vulnerable people when high membership costs discourage public participation. As an alternative, citizens interested in investing in solar energy also seek community trust-funded or citizen-donated renewable energy programs offered by community activists, local governments, or community energy enthusiasts in those neighborhoods where less restricted, more affordable measures apply. An increase in solar crowdfunding providers has offered place-based citizen-initiated solar campaigns online. The crowdfunding companies provide community-based purchasing programs through which citizens either buy solar power at whole prices through subscriptions to online platforms or earn their FiT (Feed-In-Tariff) revenues regularly.
Based on this, it is difficult to provide a single definition of community energy and what qualifies a project as a community solar initiative. It also suggests that “energy democracy” as a catchphrase in energy politics accounts for much of the spirit of participatory, shared renewable energy supply. But this concept does not sufficiently capture the complex relations among governments, businesses, and civil societies in diverse forms of community energy practices emerging in different regions around the world. While many insights of energy democracy have driven institutional and legal changes toward reconfiguring renewable energy politics and policies for a more equitable utility provision and distribution, empirical studies based mainly on energy democracy frameworks tend to presume boundaries among community energy practices, corporate operations, and state leadership. To respond to this limitation, this article repositions community energy critically and pragmatically on the grounds of theoretical debates inspired by commons scholarship and empirical practices in selected countries in East Asia.
It opens with a review of energy democracy literature in which community energy originated, identifying three features underlying existing literature: an implicit binary thinking of state and society, the understated market influence, and a lack of urban features that enable energy democracy functioning through spatial means. These phenomena also come from the fact that energy democracy research pays significantly more attention to the thriving renewable energy cooperatives in Europe compared to those in the rural context than other forms of CE practices elsewhere and in urban settings. In the meantime, more interactive and collaborative relations between corporations and civic societies in terms of operationalizing community energy in the forms of “solar or energy commons” have gradually appeared in the US and Asia. To narrow this theoretical gap, I propose the urban commons as a complementary framework to interrogate the interplay among the state, society, and market operations in community energy research and practices. This article teases out the key dimensions in terms of which the energy democracy and the urban commons frameworks can benefit most from dialogues aiming for cross-fertilization. This theoretical dialogue would allow researchers and policy makers to approaches such conceptual themes as solidarity, aspiration, justice, and sustainability –environmentally, socially, and financially – which are crucial in environmental and urban politics today.
Chihsin Chiu is an Associate Professor of the Graduate Institute of Building and Planning at National Taiwan University, Taiwan. His research explores the complexity of socio-environmental interchange in state-led urban greening projects, such as the extralegal building interventions, eco-housing developments and community solar initiatives in Taiwan. He aims to unveil how the successes and the failures of these cases can inform a better understanding of cities as places to live.