The insistent materiality of the energy system
The power of networks or how to overcome resistance to change
Hello folks,
Anyone involved in the energy sector today is wrestling one way or another with the possibility (or the threat) of change. Change is both a big sociological and a practical question. Today I’m talking to Tineke van der Schoor, who recently defended a PhD thesis that squarely addressed that question, both sociologically and practically.
I actually covered one of Tineke’s articles in an earlier special on the ‘science of technology’, where I highlighted the nifty construction of a cooperative umbrella organization and not-for-profit energy company set up by a bunch of small-scale cooperatives in the North of the Netherlands. We’ll be revisiting and expanding on that kind of networking work today!
By the way, a slightly longer version of today’s newsletter is also available as podcast in Dutch! Click on the link or look for the Social Life of Energy wherever you listen to podcasts.
There are of course many ways to frame and answer the question of change. Tineke focused her enquiry on two issues in particular:
What makes volunteer energy cooperatives even think that they could make a difference in how energy is provided?
How can we make existing buildings energy efficient, since buildings are famously not fluid? And to really get to the heart of this matter, she took an ‘extreme case’: historic (heritage) buildings, since there are both material and symbolic reasons that make it more difficult to alter one of those.
One of Tineke’s key propositions is that we see the reach and limit of change in terms of networks. Power lies in connecting people and organizations of different capacities and social location.
Let’s dive in!
The value of sustainable heritage
We’ll start with historic buildings. They resist change either because their appearance is formally regulated, or informally, because the way they look are inherent to why they are valuable to their occupants. But change does come knocking on the door, because even though people want to preserve architectural heritage:
People also want to live in more energy efficient homes, live more comfortably. So that’s the big challenge, to square these two values.
However, while these values may conflict in theory, in practice there’s actually quite a bit that’s possible. These values can be made “commensurable”, as Tineke puts it in her thesis.
Back to the future themed conference 😁, by ‘Amsterdam’s Green Canals’.
The key problem is that the knowledge of how to honour both values suffers from poor circulation.
This knowledge isn’t properly accessible to the inhabitants or the mechanics at a local level. That knowledge requires a certain kind of specialization. Your typical energy efficiency consultants aren’t aware of monument-specific techniques, so when they come to assess your home, they come up with solutions that aren’t actually allowed. You can’t issue the standard quote for a historic building like you would for a 1960s row-house.
To improve circulation, we need to connect people with various expertise.
Different organisations are home to different kinds of expertise. One knows a lot about boilers or insulation packages, while the other knows a lot about historic styles or materials in monuments. So far, they haven’t really been able to find each other.
In other words, a new network needs be established around the practice of future-proofing historic buildings.
How to do this?
Tineke mentions the ‘sustainable monument’ instrument “DuMo”, which explicitly requires professionals with different expertise – monuments and energy-efficiency, respectively – to come together and evaluate the options for a building. This is great because it fosters mutual understanding and learning, while it stops short from requiring whole-scale retraining or sectoral reconfiguration. The power of a network resides in part in the fact that it allows and encourages its different participants to do what they’re best at.
This a field that in general is still nascent, but these incipient networks invite a comparison with a much more established field, which is Tineke’s second case: cooperative energy.
Divisions of cooperative labour
Key to that case-study is the aforementioned cooperative cooperation network. I quote from the respective issue:
a bunch of local cooperatives banded together in three regional cooperative networks. Each network then became a founding member of a profit-for-purpose energy provider. For every local customer, the provider remits money to the cooperative, which it can then spend on local sustainability or energy initiatives. This is a clever kind of network of networks, where fees for energy services get recycled into the commons.
Here, too, each member of the network can do what they’re best at. Local cooperatives know what’s up in town and are able to address people personally.
Those local groups have members who’ve been part of the tennis association for 25 years. They know everyone in the neighbourhood and research shows they actually know best how to get more people to join, just by walking up to them and say ‘hey, we have something nice, I think you’d like it, why don’t you join us?
A second distinguishing characteristic of the local scale is that it allows people to claim a sense of power. “The democratic approach [of a cooperative] is quite central to many people’s motivation to join”.
Meanwhile, the cooperative umbrella organization has its own role to play. They make that ‘democratic’ work of the local cooperative possible, whether through clever circular financial arrangements, professional support or by lobbying the appropriate authorities to create the conditions for such self-directed or pro-active participation in the provisioning of energy.
Let’s take professional support.
I have tremendous respect for all these volunteers. A lot of people dedicate days and nights a week trying to stay up to date, and they are very well informed. They are a minority though and there’s little back-up manpower.
That’s why it’s significant when local cooperatives can collectively out-source some of that expertise building.
The regional umbrella organizations organize workshops with relevant experts. So, when there’s a new decree or change in some regulation, there’s people dedicated to understanding the implications. You don’t have to invent the wheel as a cooperative. This is an important step forward for this movement, which significantly expands its scope for action.
For the cooperative movement to be strong, in other words, it needs a salaried professional backbone, for lawyers for example, who can make sure organizations aren’t falling into a legal pitfall or failing to maximize their potential.
Cooperative low lands: Energy Together is cooperative energy’s recent special interest group.
What the regional (and national) professional backbone can’t do, however, is be an energy cooperative.
They would start to resemble the commercial entities the cooperatives are in part trying to replace.
At this moment they can’t contribute to recruitment and growth. Because that would require a different, marketing-like approach.
That would make them feel (and act) too much according to the commercial logic that has come to characterize the utilities in the Netherlands, which have merged and been acquired into but a few big (multinational) players. In turn, that would make them less attractive to the people who are now opting to join their local cooperative.
Some join because they want to be part of something, to stand for something. Why would they join a regular new energy company, rather than a cooperative? If people make choices out of an engagement with the local energy movement, you need to make sure they can find that same engagement in your organization.
The power of scale
In both cases we see that change is possible when connections are made across domains of expertise and socio-professional location. There is a crucial difference though. People perceive community energy as a movement, and in many ways they act as a movement. This comes with a crucial added dimension: part of what makes cooperative networks powerful is that their members operate at different ‘scales’: local, regional, national (and even international). At each scale, people perform a different kind of work, which people at other scales can’t do.
We don’t see the same kind of scalar effects in the attempts to encourage style-sensitive retrofits of historic buildings. The attempts, Tineke observes, also don’t yet amount to any proper movement. But the division of labour in community energy might offer some inspiration.
Tineke’s analysis also occasions a word of caution: as community energy gets to claim more seats at the policy table, coordination and communication across the scales will be even more crucial, to make sure the requirements and logic of operating on any particular scale doesn’t drive the organizations apart – in particular, that the representative organizations don’t lose touch with what’s happening in the towns.
Want to know more? Don’t hesitate to get into contact with Tineke about her research or her work as consultant, either through her departmental website or through LinkedIn. You can find her PhD thesis Strategies for Energy Reconfigurations: Obduracy, values and scripts here, and an overview of her individual publications on ResearchGate.
As for me, I wish you well. I’ll be back in two weeks.
Marten
PS “Insistent materiality” is a phrase I nicked from a 2016 publication by Harriet Bulkeley et al about the difficulty of drawing up a smart grid, work which I covered in this issue.