Emma Folmer and Ben Schmid about entrepreneurial change-makers in community energy and beyond
The transcript to go with the podcast.
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Transcript
KEYWORDS:
initiatives, community, energy, scale, local, project, system, values
Marten
Today I have two guests actually to talk to me about the kind of all the questions that have come up in the previous editions of the series on social innovation in sustainable energy. I have with me Emma Folmer, who is an assistant professor at the University of Groningen, campus Leeuwarden, and Ben Schmid, or Benedikt Schmid, if you look him up to find his book, who is currently a postdoc at the University of Freiburg, if I remember correctly? Yep. And I guess the main thing that we will talk about today is the relationship between the local, usually local, place based social entrepreneurship initiatives and the possibility of systemic change, especially in the energy position, but these questions are not exclusive to energy transitions. So Emma and Ben, thanks for being here. Welcome to the podcast.
So the organizing question for all of this is: if transformation were to happen, if an energy transition towards a sustainable social justice system would occur, then how would that happen? How would transition be possible? And I'd like to start with Ben's research, who has surveyed a number of different initiatives in Stuttgart, a while ago for his PhD research, people trying to do things a little bit differently. Give us an example of one of these initiatives and the kinds of problems that they ran into.
Ben
Yeah, thanks a lot, Marten. I very much like the way you put this question of when transition, if it were to happen, what would that look like? And I think, maybe just to give a little bit of context of that research: I did look at 24 different community based initiatives. So they were all the way from, let's say, more classical, social entrepreneurial type of organizations to all the way just a group of people getting together and doing something and being very loosely organized. And one of the examples and I think it is probably somewhere in between, it wasn't really an entrepreneurial type of initiative, but it was a group of people getting together and doing something very differently, I would say is, is off the grid housing, I think that's probably the case is closely related with the topic here of energy. And so what they did was they built off-the-grid house, you'd probably say tiny house, I think it was like 36 square meters, the living area of the whole area of the house. And what they did is they developed off the grid systems – energy wise, so they had solar panels on the roof and batteries for storage. But they also had a closed loop in terms of water supply. So they had water treatment, kind of the small water treatment plant, and they collectes rainwater, stored that, and treated it and then when they used it, it could be treated again. And also what they did was to close nutrient cycles. So they had an aquaponic system and they did a lot of like a gardening outside and a compostable toilet and all that kind of stuff.
So it's very interesting to see that but of course they ran into a number of issues and most of these issues didn't revolve as much around the energy supply, but more about the water supply. But maybe you can still draw lessons from that. For example, they had difficulties getting the whole water treatment kind of officially accepted by the local institutions, because by law, they would need to connect to the local sewage treatment system. But also the laws were very unspecific about how that needed to play out, but also about the whole water treatment and what kind of water? could be treated and what it could be used for. So there were a lot of gray areas that were I would say, also not handled well from the from the locals, because it wasn't always clear what the legal situation was, ? also because they did do a lot of things differently. So there were weren't always clear laws, stating you can do that and that way. So what I find interesting about that particular case is that you could see that there is not always a strict one to one match of this: something is being done wrong, or something's being done right. But there's a lot of gray area and maybe room for maneuver by let's say, local politics or local administration.
Marten
And how did the group of people who were trying to build these container houses, how did they try to maneuver within that kind of gray space?
Ben
So they did, what they actually did do is from an early point on, though I'm not sure if enough, all that was then kind of causing the whole problem, they connected to local politician, local administration. So they were very open about what they were planning to do. And they were in close contact. And, of course, when I say local administration, this is really too generalizing: there were people who were very interested in this project wereas others weren't as interested in it. Also, we talk about different levels of administration. So within the village where this was faced, they were received very well. But when you then look at the next, like next biggest town, which also had administrative duties there, there they weren't as well received. So you can see that it also is not a homogeneous space, but it plays out very differently. And they did try to? they were actually paying a lot of money to get all kinds of certificates, especially concerning the water quality. And this is really expensive. And you have to remember this just a group of people getting together building this house. So they faced a lot of obstacles, especially financial obstacles, or administrative obstacles turned into financial obstacles to put it that way, that they were difficult to come up with, but they did also collect money also from the larger community that were, let's say, following this case very closely. So you can see that although there are a lot of obstacles, the community itself as if you think about it, as a broad collective, managed in a lot of ways to at least answer to some extent to these issues. It's an interesting dynamic, also what the community can do. ?
Marten
K, yeah, interesting. So what I'm kind of hearing is that on the part of the initiative, there were various strategies, ? to make their thing possible. Whereas on the side of the municipality, one of the, the so there's two problems that you kind of illustrate: one is the fact that there are overlapping jurisdictions and that makes this challenge quite complex. And on the other side there is kind of a hesitancy on the side of the municipality to use the gray space in favor of the diverging initiative, let's say.
Ben
That’s a good way to put it, yeah.
Marten
Yeah. Okay, so let's keep that in mind. And let's compare this to a recent project that Emma has tracked, which is an energy project relating to I believe, a charging station, run by a, a, also a an initiative. Emma, would you like to say a little bit about their trajectory?
Emma
Yes, absolutely. Thanks, Marten. And thank you Ben for that interesting example, I think this case that that that is part of a research project that I'm engaged in "social entrepreneurship on the grid edge" it's called, we looked at a EV charging area, this is based in in Culemborg in the Netherlands. And this is a two phase project. So the community started with the development of a solar roof, which was placed on an empty lot in the neighborhood. And the second project linked to that is the installment of an electrical vehicle charging area. And I think one super interesting thing is that the first phase of the project ran quite smoothly. It was even the case that the municipality allocated some funds for to the local community to start their own energy cooperative. So they actually initiated some of this early development. The second phase, where it came to the EV charging area was slightly more complicated also because the technology involved was a bit more complicated and the licensing, etc., there was a was a few more hurdles. And one of the things that that the people involved told us was that they had to deal with many different silos within the administration. So they were sent to a spatial planning and legal department, they were sent to all different types of departments that could have something to say about the this project. And it wasn't until the national government sort of interfered not specifically to this case, but there was this project about a “proeftuinen slimme laadpleinen” (pilots smart charging areas), which was a national subsidy, that was designed to stimulate the development of these smart charging stations across the Netherlands. And when that was initiated from the national government, the local municipality became more willing to actually support this local group. So what they did actually was to appoint a project manager on the municipal level to help these types of local groups to develop their initiatives. So that made a huge change, of course, because then there was suddenly somebody in the municipality, who was helping this community energy project to implement their ideas.
So I think that also shows you that there is somehow a very interesting dynamic and interaction going on between actions taken on a local level and on different municipal, regional and national level. And what you were saying earlier Marten before you started recording, talking about complexity and complex systems, and how sometimes things need to come together to create this window of opportunity, that people,sort of jump into to make this really happen, this type of projects. And that I think that links a bit to what Ben was also saying that you need to be able to, to play that complexity to your advantage a bit, I think.
Marten
Yeah, it’s interesting indeed, that you have the solar roof, which in a sense, is already kind of a domesticated technology, like we've had these things for a while, and there are laws in place that allow people to place these on their homes or on other rooftop surfaces, for example. And so that can then go relatively smoothly, but then you get to this newer technology that hasn't been in place and it doesn't have the institutional frameworks for it to get set up. Then it becomes this innovation trajectory where people have to get to cobble together the different elements to put into place and reminded me also the fact that the national government interfered So if you, if you look at the way that the initiative kind of related to this initial complexity, like you mentioned that they needed to go to these different silos in the administration, how did they handle that? Like, were they effective in doing so, did it really require this new manager to kind of move the project forward?
Emma
Well, I think it's an interesting question. I think there also you see a separation, I think, but within this community group, if you if you think about community entrepreneurship, or using a different word, “collective entrepreneurship”, because in the end, it's a collective that tries to put resources together to achieve some sort of outcome. So speaking of collective entrepreneurship, what this particular group did was, it was not the entrepreneurial agents, if I can pinpoint who's who, who had this idea, and who drove this idea. But actually what they did is they appointed a project manager, who was far more experienced in dealing with bureaucracy and paperwork, and all these institutional demands that needed to be fulfilled. And so they appointed this person and who, on their behalf, accomplished a lot in terms of meeting the institutional demands for them, which I think was quite interesting. That they separated out roles within their group, looking really at the expertise of who was involved in assigning tasks. Yeah, I think that's one question that often comes up when looking at community or collective entrepreneurship:, who's the entrepreneur, who's doing what and to what extent is the community as a whole truly involved? Or is it only a couple of agents that really pursue a particular project?
Marten
Interesting. I’d like to latch on a little bit to this, this idea of complexity. One of the questions is whether these local initiatives that are usually, you know, run in people's free times - they're amateurs in certain sense, driven by motivation, not necessarily by professional sort of habitat - if they are able to, if they're the right actors, let's say to drive change in the system. This is kind of interesting question also for energy. Recently, the European Union has renewed some of their directives related to electricity and energy, and reserved a special role for energy communities with the idea that if we place part of the ownership of the energy system in the hands of communities, then maybe we also allow this transition to happen faster. But then they run into all these kinds of troubles, like the ones that you just mentioned, Emma. Maybe you can say a little bit more about this tension in the relationship between local initiatives and collective entrepreneurs and the system if you will?
Emma
Yeah, in this research project, we look at these community energy initiatives, but at the same time we also try to speak to as many stakeholders on different levels as we can. So try to reach people would have been involved on a municipal level or the regional level. And for this particular case, we also interviewed some people who are part of regional organizations that are in charge of rolling out some of the infrastructure related to charging of electric vehicles. And when they talk about community energy and energy initiatives, and not particularly this case, but more in general they sound a bit dismissive. And I don't think that they are truly negative towards these initiatives. But they simply say, if you look at the facts, what these smaller companies or community energy organizations lack is scale, right? Scaling is incredibly hard for these smaller organizations. And often they don't even want to scale, they want to do something for their own community for their own neighborhood. And that's what they want to achieve. But the people on the higher levels, rolling out this infrastructure, argue, we don't really need small scale projects. We need scale, in order to achieve the energy transition, we need to roll out this infrastructure efficiently on the national level, and bigger organizations are far better placed to actually do all of this compared to these smaller organizations. One reason, and there are multiple, but one reason that stood out to me was that the technological development is happening so fast in this field, speaking of electric vehicles, technology is developing so fast, that the smaller organizations, they simply can't keep up because ,Marten, like you said, a lot of these people, they do this on the side, and they don't have the necessary information to keep up with development to implement the newest technology locally, so to say.
Marten
Okay, yeah, so let's, let's try to unpack that that sort of argument. Let's dwell a little bit on what's being said: one argument is ‘scale is essential for this transformation to happen’ like we need to decarbonize the mobility system. Charging stations are a crucial part of that, if we want to do this quickly and perhaps if we want to do this economically, we need to do it at scale. And there is certain certainly that argument, the fact that we now have very cheap solar panels, for example, is due to the fact that it's become this thing that is produced at enormous, mass scales. So there's economy of scale as well. And then there's the argument of expertise and the amount of know how it takes and the time that it takes to actually, you know, work successfully in this fast moving sector. So what would be the counter arguments? Maybe, Ben, you'd like to say something about that?
Ben
Yeah, I think first of all, as Emma and I both have background in geography, I think the word scale itself maybe is sometimes used in a way that's a little bit uneasy for us geographers, I mean, we can imagine scale as levels or just like the sheer, like scaling up the sheer amount of something that is there. But we can also have different imaginaries of scale, when we, for example, see that communities are doing a lot of similar things and a lot of different places, that's also a form of scaling. When we see a kind of congruence between different - and they don't even necessarily have to be connected or networked. But similar things are happening in so many different places and I think that's also something we shouldn't overlook. Even though, of course, the single instance or initiative is maybe not as conspicuous and big, they are very ubiquitous, and they happen in a lot of different places. I think that's definitely something we have to also look out for when we when we look at energy transitions, so that there will definitely be one argument. And I think another to be made is to when we when we consider the argument that we need large scale developers, maybe that would speed up some kind of transition in one respect, maybe it would be the latest technology, maybe it would be more professional in a way that they can pay people to deal with the legal frameworks better than community and voluntary groups can do that. But we shouldn't overlook all the other values that are created within these community types of organizations and initiatives. There are a lot of social values, there's social and community building. There is of course, a kind of also governance issue that communities may build and own to certain extent their own energy and other kind of basic needs, ?. So I think there's a good argument to be made that maybe, if we look at it purely from an kind of efficiency point of view, maybe there's an argument to be made for the large scale developers. But I think we should also look at the ownership models and the community building and social cohesion that comes with it. And I think there's really a big argument to be made to maybe, rather than getting big developers into it, find some ways to support these communities. And this could be done, of course, by communities themselves through networking, I think there's a lot of social learning going on between initiatives. But it could also be to kind of create what we could call supportive or transformative infrastructure. So that could be supporting this institutional support: how community initiatives can deal with the administrative apparatus, or, as I said, there are so many different examples that each community initiative is not, especially in the energy sector, it's not the first one to face all these issues. So there could be a lot done to facilitate some mutual learning and create some institutional support, that then in turn would, of course, make these community initiatives also more efficient in a very traditional sense of the word.
Marten
Yeah, interesting.. So that's one point there is, this is these initiatives are happening all over the place, and they might have some systemic effect there, similar to a large rollout or whatever, by some central actor. There are the other values. And I think that we should talk about that a little bit as well. Not just financial values, but also social, ecological community cohesion. And the fact that we have a system that is not geared towards community initiatives, but if we do build one, then it may turn out that these initiatives may look very inefficient, may look slow, let's say at this moment, but that might actually be a lot faster if we can accommodate them more. Emma, do you want to add anything to this?
Emma
Well, I just wanted to, to latch on what you were saying about what Ben also said about these many different initiatives together amounting to social change, institutional change. And I think that's also the entrepreneurship part of it, right? So for every successful enterprise that you see there have been X number of failed enterprises that came before it. So, and I think that one of the arguments, linking to what Ben was saying about why these community energy initiatives are so valuable, is that if you equip these groups of people with information, with know-how, with self-efficacy, that they can accomplish things, this empowers people on a local level, right? And empowering people also gives them a sense of being able to create change, whether that's a small change or a big change. And if we have many, many changemakers, connected, at least on local levels, I think that together, cumulatively, this will help us forward. I think an image that speaks at least to too many of us is that says, I'm an informed citizen who feels capable and equipped to actually make a change, to make a difference. And I think leaving everything to, to the bigger players, so to say, to roll out the energy transition more efficiently, passes over that idea of an informed engaged citizen. So I think there's value in that, tremendous value.
Ben
Can I quickly add on to that, because I think the word connection here is very key. And Marten, I find it very interesting that you mentioned the kind of repairable light example because that's also one example that was part of my research. And here maybe just to add some more illustration, how that could work out, is that there was one startup or initiative that focused on building repairable long lasting lights. And they cooperated with the tiny house example that I mentioned at the beginning. And they did so because they were so kind of drawn into each other's project, they were so interested in, that they collaborated without any kind of trading or like financial back and forth. This is something very small, it's very particular. But it can be inspiring. And I think that's important: when we look at these connections, there are a lot of people out there who are intrinsically motivated to do things differently. And if they, if they are giving this if they're given the space, and of course, it is always, always, early on later, it comes back to them that they have to be stable in financial terms somehow, but if they aren't being graded, if they are being provided that space to to do things differently, they will and they will find different ways of doing so. And I think that that can be very inspiring. So the examples might not be impactful in the material sense, but they can definitely be impactful, inspirational. And also maybe in a social sense.
Marten
Okay, yeah. Nice. You mentioned already the, the need to at least secure the financial bottom line, I'd like to talk about that to kind of close off this discussion. Maybe just one more comment about the idea of efficiency. And maybe the inefficiency of efficiency, in some senses, this idea that if we just go big, then we'll do things better, particularly in the energy field, going big these days means erecting wind turbines somewhere, and hopefully lots of them. And that, of course, of course, has generated a lot of opposition in recent years. Mostly because of this idea of wanting to go faster wanting to go big, like both these are not don't go very well with people's sense of ownership over their own kind of environment and space. And a couple of additions back I talked to Helena Solman about CO production, the idea of c- production of allowing people to actually sort of make in the sense that wind turbines or other energy technologies, together with the companies, and one of the things that she came up with is that what you found is that maybe people will actually be very willing to have smaller wind turbines in their proverbial backyard. And maybe we should accept that maybe these are not going to be as these smaller wind turbines are not going to be as as efficient in the the amount of power To generate, but if they are acceptable to people, if people are willing to sort of embrace them, then that might be something that is worth considering. Especially because these things will work in its local setting, rather than be a part of this sort of global, the national energy grid, for example. So yeah, if we, if we don't do that, then we just generate opposition, and we slow down this supposedly efficient process.
But to round off kind of this, this idea of scale, professionalization efficiency, versus the the idea of going local as a way of going global. And let's talk about this last point, namely, multiple value creation, one characteristic of social entrepreneurship is that it doesn't only pursue financial returns, but it really explicitly tries to go for to realize other values as well, whether it be social values, or in this case, often also environmental values. And Emma I believe that you have something to say about from your research, both in energy and before about how difficult it is to juggle these, these different kinds of values.
Emma
Yeah, thanks, Marten. One of the things that we have been discussing is also how a lot of changes and innovations, and new technologies in this field of energy, are, are not simply that, right? They're not simply new technologies, new machines or something that you implement that it works and you get an impact, there has to be also has to also be a social change. So there has to be something in people's behavior, or people's attitude or mindset that needs to change with it, in order for it to, to work to have the desired effect, people need to use technology in order for it to have an effect. And I think that's, you can also consider that multiple value creation, right, you can consider that it says that a new technology might be creating some environmental value or ecological value. But if it also creates people's understanding of the problem that they are solving by using this new technology, or the people's willingness to invest in changing their behavior to work towards the energy transition, that's also social value. So helping people be part of a change, be part of the energy transition, that's also democratizing. So, in that sense, I would also say that is a social value in itself. And in the grid edge project, we also look at this idea of multiple value creation by say, Okay, on the one hand, you have the implementation of these new technologies. On the other hand, you also have the people involved in in doing this, and on the one hand, this, this, this renewed or understanding, this feeling of empowerment, that I was talking earlier about this feeling of self-efficacy of being part of the change, that is a social value creation. So I would say that community energy initiatives are actually good examples of, of the type of organizations that are really trying to create both social value and environmental value simultaneously.
Marten
One final word about this, Ben?
Ben
Yeah, maybe to add to this. The huge question when it comes to any type of social change is always where to start. And I think there's not the place that the one place to start, that will probably be, you'd probably look in vain for the single place to start. It's always the kind of dynamic, but maybe we can consider that the whole, like social entrepreneurs and community initiatives. And as we've said before, there are so many of them. So I would see this as they've really done a start, even though it is so difficult, even though the framework conditions are in a lot of ways, very adverse to these types of organizing, they exist in very large numbers. So I would say that this is the dynamic that has started and that is continuing to grow. And on the other side, we need and this would be the other side of the dynamic. We need responses. So to speak, from the from policy sides, I would say and I'm not pointing out a particular level of policymaking. But I would definitely say that it is now very much time for policy to respond by creating framework conditions that can use this dynamic that is already there that's already happening, and channel it and put it on a larger footing and really appreciate what is going on in these in these multitudes of different initiatives. So I think there's really a lot to be done in terms of the framework conditions that need to be created to put this on a larger footing.
Marten
Yep, I think that is an excellent way to finish up. We've been talking about this question of how transformation would be possible. What we've seen, at the very least, is that there is a lot of innovation and transformation happening at these small local scales. We talked a little bit about the value of those initiatives. And basically, what we need in a sense for this transformation to be possible is kind of a learning disposition by especially policymakers and civil servants. And that means in part to recognize the value of these initiatives that are maybe not things that they as we've seen in the case of the charging station, but this definitely could be repeated over and over again in other cases: often there there is this dismissive attitude because, yeah, it's more, for example, it's more difficult to kind of figure out how to work with all these small scale initiatives rather than working with big partners that can do things at quote unquote, scale, but yeah, there's also the bigger question of how we do sustainability, economically and otherwise. And as Ben just said, These initiatives have made a start. And now we need to engage with them and figure out how to adapt the system to accommodate these kinds of ways of doing more than they have been. Now, unfortunately, it exceeds the time of this podcast to also go into how things his government or civil servants could learn from these initiatives. So we'll have to keep that for another time. For now, I would like to thank you both Emma and Ben, for being here. And you can follow Emma’s work, at least through the project. Social Entrepreneurshio at the grid edge,
And Ben recently published a book based on his PhD. Ben, Would you remind us the title of the book?
Ben
The book is called Making transformative geographies. Lessons from Stuttgart's community economies. So this is about the examples that I mentioned. And if you want to read up on them, feel free to do so. And if you cannot find the book online, you can just drop me an email.
Marten
Awesome. I'll put links to them, at least to both of these projects in in the newsletter. So do check them out. For now, thanks for listening to us. And thanks again, Emma, and Ben,
Ben
thank you for having us.
Emma
Thank you Marten