Local ownership: Does It Matter?: A Cross-Case Institutional Analysis of 14 Onshore Wind Farms in the Netherlands

Wind energy is deemed important in the Netherlands in sustainable energy transitions. While Commercial Wind Energy Project Developers (CWEPDs) bring professionalism, Local Energy Cooperatives (LECs) promote local renewable initiatives. The Dutch Klimaatakkoord aims for 50% community-owned renewable electricity, but real-world implementation of...

Energy Security of Thermal Energy Communities

This thesis aims to support the design and implementation of energy-secure thermal energy communities (TEC) by investigating their technical, behavioural and institutional settings through a collective action perspective. The thesis shows that energy-secure TEC initiatives are collective energy systems with particular characteristics and...

Analysing community-based initiatives for heating and cooling: A systematic and critical review

Energy communities are decentralized socio-technical systems where energy is jointly generated and distributed among a community of households locally. As the energy that is shared among the community is commonly electricity, the energy community's literature is dominated by electricity-systems and mostly neglects collective thermal energy as an...

Energy security in community energy systems: An agent-based modelling approach

In community energy systems, the energy demand of a group of households is met by collectively generated electricity and heat from renewable energy sources. What makes these systems unique is their collective and collaborative form of organization and their distributed energy generation. While these features are crucial to the resilience of...

Simulating thermal energy community formation: Institutional enablers outplaying technological choice

Energy communities are key elements for local energy transitions, collectively generating, distributing and consuming energy, using renewable energy technologies. Thermal energy communities, as one type of energy community, are focused on thermal energy applications, such as heating, cooling, bathing, showering and providing hot tap water. As...

Just Energy? Designing for Ethical Acceptability in Smart Grids

Smart grids within the transition to sustainable energy systems Smart grid systems are widely considered as crucial in the energy transition, because they allow for greater flexibility in bridging temporal gaps between electricity supply and demand in renewable energy systems. To do so, the systems make use of information and communication...

Can industries be parties in collective action? Community energy in an Iranian industrial zone

The industrial sector plays a huge role in creating economic growth. While energy is vital for industries to thrive, various factors are undermining the availability of energy including phasing out of fossil fuels, CO2 emission caps and, the large gap between the fast developments of industrial clusters and the energy supply, especially in...