Co-production in distributed generation:Renewable energy and creating space for fitting infrastructure within landscapes

This review describes the infrastructural elements of the socio-technical system of power supply based on renewables and the role of landscape concerns in decision-making about emerging ‘intelligent grids’. The considerable land areas required for energy infrastructure call for sizable ‘distributed generation’ close to energy consumption. Securing community acceptance of renewables’ infrastructure, perceived impacts on the community, and ‘landscape justice’ requires two types of co-production: in power supply and in making space available. With co-production, landscape issues are prominent, for some options dominant. However, ‘objectification’ of landscape, such as the use of ‘visibility’ as proxy for ‘visual impact’, is part of lingering centralised and hierarchical approaches to the deployment of renewables. Institutional tendencies of centralisation and hierarchy, in power supply management as well as in siting, should be replaced by co-production, as follows from common pool resources theory. Co-production is the key to respecting landscape values, furthering justice, and achieving community acceptance

Distributed generation of sustainable energy as a common pool resource: social acceptance in rural setting of smart (micro-)grid configurations

According to the major trend in the literature on distributed generation adoption of composite multi-generation systems may yield significant benefits in terms of energy efficiency and reduced carbon emissions. The microgrid is a cluster of loads of electricity users and micro-sources that operate as a single controllable system for generating and using power. It enables the production and storage of renewable energy, as well as the exchange of electricity between energy providers and consumers to take place locally. The social foundations of smart grids consist of decentralised socio-technical networks that underpin the electricity consumption of groups of consumers/end-users who are increasingly becoming autonomous. This article explores these factors for conditions that can be found in rural areas. These socio-technical networks form a community that exhibits high levels of interaction and integration between the actors, while the social construction of smart metering is key factor in determining the character of the smart grid. Most existing institutions, which are designed to support the centralized power supply system, will prove to be unfit for emerging microgrids within an integrated smart grid. This will likely to impede the deployment of distributed generation, in particular renewable energy

Actor networks and the construction of applicable knowledge: the case of the Timbre Brownfield Prioritization Tool

This article deals with experiences acquired during the process of developing the Timbre Brownfield Prioritization Tool (TBPT). Developing a decision support tool that takes into account the expectations and experiences of its potential users is similar to creating applicable knowledge by the joint action of scientists and heterogeneous actors. Actor network theory is used to explore the construction of this form of applicable knowledge as a process of actor network creation. Following the French sociologist Callon, networks are seen to be initiated and carried out by a group of scientists (tool developers) via four moments of translation, called problematization, interessement, enrolment and mobilization. Each step in the construction of the TBPT—from the initial research question to the final model—can be linked in retrospect to changing configurations of actor networks. Based on the experiences of the tool developers in the Czech Republic, Poland, Germany and Romania, we illustrate how these configurations varied across space and time. This contribution emphasizes the ability to correlate gains in knowledge with the more visible changes in the scope of actor networks in order to highlight achievements but also limitations in acquiring applicable knowledge