Networking Clean Energy: Smart Cities and the Rise of Cooperative Communities

The rising demand for sustainable energy generation in the development of smart cities offers significant promise for co-producing and co-managing clean energy. What seems increasingly likely is that smart cities with be configured around peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies that facilitate multi-scale collaboration. Indeed, the same network properties that have transformed information and communication technologies (ICTs) are now beginning to transform the production and consumption of energy. Beyond the command-and-control systems characteristic of an industrial society, “smart grids” provide citizen-producers with a cooperative platform for harvesting clean energy sources like solar, wind, and biomass. This paper discusses the redesign of energy generation in the United States around distributed energy resources (DER) and considers new public policies geared toward economic development in supporting the storage and transmission of DER. It is our view that any strategy for managing clean energy within smart cities will depend upon the robust cooperation of citizens and communities around networked energy platforms.