Tineke van der Schoor

In several European countries, an increasing part of the production of renewable energy is generated by citizen-owned production units. These units are installed and managed individually or by local communities, and the number of local energy initiatives, who aim to increase local energy production, is rising rapidly. This has resulted in a new research area we label as community energy. Community energy is defined as local production of renewable energy, governed by citizens, with a view to contribute to the transition to a sustainable energy system. In this study, the authors use community energy to encompass several terms that have been used so far in the literature, such as citizen’s power, grassroots energy, and local governance of energy production. They specifically address the role of the individual, acting as consumer, prosumer or citizen. The aim of the study is to identify the key issues and concepts covered in the community energy literature so far and to reflect on how ...

De Energieagenda acht de energieproductie door bedrijven en burgers belangrijk voor het creeren van bewustzijn en draagvlak voor de energietransitie. Decentrale en lokale energieproductie vermag echter meer, ze kan namelijk een substantiele bijdrage leveren aan de totale energieproductie.

Sporen uit het verleden zijn het waard bewaard te worden voor volgende generaties! In het onderzoeksproject Energieke Restauratie (2011-2013) van het kenniscentrum NoorderRuimte is twee jaar onderzoek gedaan naar restauratie, energieconcepten en herontwikkeling van historische gebouwen. Dit project, gefinancierd door SIA-RAAK, werd uitgevoerd in samenwerking met vele bedrijven en instellingen in Noord-Nederland. Energieke Restauratie verwijst naar een integrale aanpak van behoud en vernieuwing in historische gebouwen, met een hoge ambitie voor energiebesparing. Een ‘Energieke Restauratie’ begint met het herkennen van wensen en randvoorwaarden in het vooronderzoek. Zo wordt bij het ontwerp rekening gehouden met historische waarden, energie, en gebruikerswensen. Uiteraard wordt er bij de restauratie van een historisch gebouw veel aandacht besteed aan effecten op de lange termijn, bijvoorbeeld voor het voorkomen van schade aan historische materialen, flexibiliteit voor (toekomstig) geb...

Sustaining historical buildings does not always align with the ambition to promote sustainability in the built environment. In this paper we explore the dynamics and strategies that spring from this basic tension, by investigating the differences and similarities between expert’s valuation and peoples’ valuation of historical buildings, as well as their views on energy efficiency. Our paper highlights mediaeval churches in Groningen, which represent an important European heritage. We cooperate closely with the SOGK, a regional organization that is taking up the challenge of maintaining these churches in a region that is depopulating, secularizing and, to all that, suffering from earthquakes.

Local voluntary groups often play an important role in the day-to-day care for historic churches, therefore the perspective of laypersons is very relevant for their conservation. In this paper, we investigate laypersons’ valuation of historic buildings, their experiences of thermal comfort in those buildings and contrast this with their views on the appropriateness of energy efficiency measures. This paper presents four case studies of medieval churches in Groningen, Netherlands. We applied interviews and photo-elicitation to investigate the values held by local committees that take daily care of the churches in our sample. Our theoretical contribution lies in the combination of valuation studies and heritage approaches. Valuation studies is used to investigate the values that are attached to historic buildings by various stakeholders. We apply the ‘heritage-as–a-spatial-vector’ approach which focuses on using heritage as a resource and to position heritage in relation to developmen...

To facilitate energy transition, regulators have devised ‘regulatory sandboxes’ to create a participatory experimentation environment for exploring revision of energy law in several countries. These sandboxes allow for a two-way regulatory dialogue between an experimenter and an approachable regulator to innovate regulation and enable new socio-technical arrangements. However, these experiments do not take place in a vacuum but need to be formulated and implemented in a multi-actor, polycentric decision-making system through collaboration with the regulator but also energy sector incumbents, such as the distribution system operator. Therefore, we are exploring new roles and power division changes in the energy sector as a result of such a regulatory sandbox. We researched the Dutch executive order ‘experiments decentralized, sustainable electricity production’ (EDSEP) that invites homeowners’ associations and energy cooperatives to propose projects that are prohibited by extant regu...

During the last decades, many energy local energy cooperatives have been established, particularly in Europe. This paper examines to what extent these cooperaticves may change the current energy system or will develop into niche markets. We will first describe what should be seen as central elements of the 'energy regime' and as central elements of the local energy cooperatives. Then we will review some examples of succesfull cooperatives from some European countries and from the Netherlands. It is concluded that it is far to early to draw robust conclusions, but it is also concluded that there are some good examples of cooperatives that really lead to socio-technological innovations. These innovations, however, are more rooted in practical experiences than in large scale R&D programs. Some of these cooperative-based-innovations really affect elements of existing energy regimes, such as storage and distrinution systems, ownerships relations and pricing systems. Other coopera...

The conservation of our heritage buildings is a European wide policy objective. Historical buildings are not only works of art, but embody an important source of local identity and form a connection to our past. Protection agencies aim to preserve historical qualities for future generations. Their work is guided by restoration theory, a philosophy developed and codified in the course of the 19th and 20th century. European covenants, such as the Venice Charter, express shared views on the conservation and restoration of built heritage. Today, many users expect a building with modern comfort as well as a historical appearance. Moreover, new functionality is needed for building types that have outlived their original function. For example, how to reuse buildings such as old prisons, military barracks, factories, or railway stations? These new functions and new demands pose a challenge to restoration design and practices. Another, perhaps conflicting EU policy objective is the reduction...

The transformation to a decentralized renewable energy system requires the transformation of communities. Increasingly, citizens become 'prosumers' and take energy production in their own hands. More and more citizens pool their resources to start a local energy initiative. In the Netherlands, more than 500 such initiatives seek to reshape the energy system in the face of constraints embedded in cultural, social, economic and political traditions. In this respect, the built environment poses considerable challenges, because of on the one hand the inscripted unsustainabilities in the layout of buildings and infrastructures in general, and on the other hand the heritage values attached to historical buildings in particular. In this paper we reconstruct the heterogeneous networks of two local communities (Franeker and Zuidhorn) in the north of the Netherlands and analyse their approaches to transform the energy system while accounting for cultural heritage of the built environm...