Grassroots digital fabrication in makerpaces. Report from a World Café

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Innovation Dynamics of Socio-Technical Alignment in Community Energy Storage:The Cases of DrTen and Ecovat

With energy transition gaining momentum, energy storage technologies are increasingly spotlighted as they can effectively handle mismatches in supply and demand. The decreasing cost of distributed energy generation technologies and energy storage technologies as well as increasing demand for local flexibility is opening up new possibilities for the deployment of energy storage technologies in local energy communities. In this context, community energy storage has potential to better integrate energy supply and demand at the local level and can contribute towards accommodating the needs and expectations of citizens and local communities as well as future ecological needs. However, there are techno-economical and socio-institutional challenges of integrating energy storage technologies in the largely centralized present energy system, which demand socio-technical innovation. To gain insight into these challenges, this article studies the technical, demand and political articulations of new innovative local energy storage technologies based on an embedded case study approach. The innovation dynamics of two local energy storage innovations, the seasalt battery of DrTen® and the seasonal thermal storage Ecovat®, are analysed. We adopt a co-shaping perspective for understanding innovation dynamics as a result of the socio-institutional dynamics of alignment of various actors, their articulations and the evolving network interactions. Community energy storage necessitates thus not only technical innovation but, simultaneously, social innovation for its successful adoption. We will assess these dynamics also from the responsible innovation framework that articulates various forms of social, environmental and public values. The socio-technical alignment of various actors, human as well as material, is central in building new socio-technical configurations in which the new storage technology, the community and embedded values are being developed

Grassroots digital fabrication and makerspaces: Reconfiguring, relocating and recalibrating innovation?

Around the world, diverse groups of people are making things together in community-based workshops and their networks. Equipped with versatile digital design and manufacturing technologies, global networks of workshops, like Hackerspaces and FabLabs, provide facilities for exploring 'comons-based, peer production' in practice; and they are spreading rapidly. Emphasis rests in bringing people into collaborative DIY projects where they innovate and learn together - from making toys and jewellery to solar panels and eco-houses - and use on-line social media to connect to open-source designs, tutorials, and workshops globally. Excited claims are made about workshops transforming practices of design, innovation, production and consumption; 'how you live, work and play in a world where anybody can make anything anywhere'. Excitement includes claims for a 'third industrial revolution' and post-consumer sustainable societies. Less evident, however, are social scientific analyses of the practices and governance arrangements actually emerging in workshop spaces and networks, and which could contribute to debate about their possibilities and limitations for sustainability. Some workshops do enable design and innovation for recycling, re-manufacturing, and feeding user-led prototypes into sustainable local enterprise. They might even reinforce virtues relevant to post-consumption societies through peer production, the sharing economy, and collaborative consumption. However, evidence also suggests a dispersal of production capacity, diminished (resource) scale efficiencies, and intensified consumption through the personalisation of manufacturing. Our paper develops a conceptual framework for analysing workshop. Drawing upon science and technology studies, social movement theory, and material culture, we consider community workshops configuring and performing production and consumption across three inter-connected levels: networked-communities, local-workshops, and user-projects. Relationships across these levels are complex. When combined with contested ambiguities inherent to sustainable development, then static, life-cycle analyses or similar into sustainability potential is misplaced. Rather, workshops constitute dynamic spaces for experimentation, and it is the emerging capabilities and material cultures that are most significant for aspirations to post-consumer societies

Being a Better Neighbor:A Value-Based Perspective on Negotiating Acceptability of Locally-Owned Wind Projects

We pose that instead of problematizing negative attitudes of local stakeholders, such as citizens and NGOs, wind energy implementers should be more focused on scrutinizing the acceptability of their projects. The emphasis in this study is on the potential for representation of local stakeholders’ values in the project design, including amongst others business model and placement. Informed by value sensitive design literature, we analyzed two contrasting, locally-owned wind projects in the Dutch province of Groningen: the implementation of mini-turbines in a national landscape and a large-scale multi MW wind project in an industrialized area close to a World Heritage nature reserve. The study analyses how the respective farmer-developers and other local stakeholders attempted to resolve or ameliorate inter-and intra-value conflicts regarding livability, economy, landscape, and nature. The value conflicts turned out to be fruitful to identifying key issues and creating more widely shared value conceptualizations and design priorities. Hence, from this study it can be concluded that value conflict can be productive if carefully unpacked and managed. Uneven power distribution among stakeholders in the planning process, overcoming incommensurability of perspectives, and creating intersubjectivity remain challenges

New pathways for community energy and storage

Worldwide, the energy landscape is changing [...

How Local Energy Initiatives Develop Technological Innovations:Growing an Actor Network

Local energy initiatives are of growing interest to studies of grassroots innovation for sustainability. Some of these initiatives have developed novel technological solutions to fulfil local demand for renewable energy. However, whereas the upscaling and diffusion of grassroots innovations has been extensively discussed in the literature, their emergence has received very little attention so far. We will therefore focus on how energy initiatives can develop technological innovations by bringing together local actors and creating a fit to local circumstances. Grounded in actor network theory (ANT) and structured by concepts from Callon's sociology of translation, we studied two technologically innovative projects of a Dutch energy initiative. Through document analysis and interviews, we researched how these initiatives developed their innovations by forming networks of social, material, and discursive elements. We found that the outcomes of the innovation processes are very dependent on the networking capacities of the energy initiatives, as well as how well they fit with external circumstances and opportunities. The paper concludes with five lessons for grassroots technological innovation: form links with the local, extensively scrutinize plans, create tangible proof of alignments, position the project as beneficial to as many actors as possible, and adjust the level of ambition to the strength of the actor network