Making space for community energy: landed property as barrier and enabler of community wind projects

Robert Wade (Corresponding author), David Rudolph

Onderzoeksoutput: Bijdrage aan tijdschrift › Tijdschriftartikel › Academic › peer review

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Samenvatting

Renewable energy infrastructures, such as wind and solar farms, require land on which they can be deployed. While politics and conflicts over accessing land for renewables are well documented, the role, conditions and potential agency of landownership have been often overlooked or oversimplified as a powerful terrain in the field of renewables development. In this paper, we explore the relationship between landed property and community renewable energy projects. In particular, we focus on how landed property variously influences the development modes of renewables by acting as a mediator, barrier and enabler for different types of wind energy projects. We show how this takes place through appropriation of rents in processes of assetisation and value grabbing by landowners. In this way, value grabbing acts as a vital intermediary process to understand green grabbing and wider processes of capital accumulation through renewables. We draw on insights from the Netherlands and Scotland to illuminate different mechanisms, social and historical conditions, and policies through which landed property constrains or enables community wind energy projects. The paper finishes by sketching out some alternative ways of allocating land for the deployment of renewable energy projects, which could help shift the balance of power in favour of community energy developments.
Originele taal-2Engels
Pagina's (van-tot)35-50
Aantal pagina's16
TijdschriftGeographica Helvetica
Volume79
Nummer van het tijdschrift1
DOI's
StatusGepubliceerd - 5 feb. 2024

Financiering

This research has been supported by Horizon 2020 (grant no. 813837) and Norges Forskningsråd (grant no. Energix NFR 280902). Indeed, citizen and community-led energy projects have only recently been acknowledged and received support from the EU. The Renewable Energy Directive (RED) II introduced an enabling legal framework, which supports community energy initiatives and renewables self-consumers. More recently, the 2019 EU “Clean Energy for all Europeans” package further supports community energy initiatives through providing a set of rights and obligations for such entities to produce, consume, aggregate, store and sell electricity. However, this package faces difficulties in national transposition, and it remains to be seen how it will pan out in practice (Frieden et al., 2021). In recognition of the need for sensitivity to local context as well as the potential pitfalls of prematurely defining community energy (Tews, 2018), the EU has defined an energy community broadly as an organisation which “Require a legal entity as a community umbrella; Must be voluntary and open; Should be primarily value-driven rather than focusing on financial profits; Require specific governance (i.e. “effective control” by certain participants)” (Frieden et al., 2021:5). For this research, this definition adequately distinguishes the phenomena we refer to as community energy in our study from utility-scale or commercial development, as well as individual self-consumption/prosumerism.

FinanciersFinanciernummer
European Commission
Norges ForskningsrådNFR 280902
European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme813837

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