Scaling-up and Scaling-down: A Degrowth Perspective on the Role of Energy Cooperatives

Daniel Petrovics, Federico Savini (please note we are two authors but the registration system does not allow me to register a second one) There is a growing evidence base that well-functioning energy communities are becoming institutionalized. These communities are a form of energy governance, which introduce renewable energy sources at the local-scale and at the same time democratize the governance of said resources. Questions remain as to how energy communities effectively contribute to a future based on degrowth and under what conditions they contribute to achieving environmental and social aims simultaneously. Towards this end in this article, we examine publicly available data sets on energy production and consumption in our case study of Amsterdam and triangulate this with academic literature and primary data from key stakeholders involved in the energy transition and energy communities. Through a heuristic, we argue that energy communities can support a degrowth transition along for key processes, which we define as reduction, democratization, maintenance, and substitution. First, we explore by what means energy communities can reduce consumption through self-production. We examine to what extent collective self-consumption also contributes to a reduction of energy use. Second, we outline how energy communities democratize the management of the surplus of energy. We examine how decisions made about the value added from the cooperative governance model reflect democratic principles. Third, we examine whether energy communities also maintain the utilized infrastructure in the long run. And finally, we explore how energy communities can perform ‘substitution’ of privately owned fossil fuels with commonly owned renewable energy sources. We apply our framework to the municipality of Amsterdam as it has been one of the first cities to adopt the Doughnut model: a mission-based approach for limiting resource use, whilst explicitly enhancing the well-being of citizens. Arguably, much of this approach aligns with the degrowth perspective as the city aims to create a socially just and ecologically safe operating space, which focuses on ecological transitions and the empowerment of citizens at the same time. One key aspect of this approach is to limit energy and related greenhouse gas emissions on the resource side whilst ensuring a socially just transition that ensures access to clean energy for all. Accordingly, the municipality has included energy communities as one approach towards the energy transition. Our key contribution is dual; in the academic sense it lies in connecting degrowth literature with empirical observations on the energy transition at the local scale whilst in the practical sense it provides critical reflections to practitioners who aim to implement the Doughnut model in cities overall.