Twisting like a cabbage worm: The politics of enacting sustainable futures through energy communities

Abstract

In 2019, the European Union launched a set of eight legislative acts called the Clean Energy Package, which introduced energy communities as a formal actor in its regulatory framework. Often defined as the cooperative production and management of energy through civic engagement, high hopes have been pinned on energy communities to serve as instruments for realizing fundamental ideals of energy democracy. Although it has been recognized that energy communities are fraught enterprises that involve multiple actors and cut across geographic scales and vertical levels of policy and politics, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the processes through which they take shape. In this paper, we approach energy community initiatives as sociotechnical configurations, examining how actors, technologies, and institutions are assembled, drawn into relation, and held together in collective efforts to shape the future. Our locus is two energy communities under configuration in the Swedish energy landscape: one part of a climate-smart urban planning project in the city of Örebro, and one in the sparsely populated rural countryside on the island of Gotland. By treating the configuration of energy communities as place-based enactments of sustainable futures, we illustrate how the prospects of community energy are shaped in practice and illuminate the composition of power that permeates the politics of future-making.