The role of local authorities in governing and scaling Local Energy Communities

Skyrocketing energy prices and fuel scarcity, driven in part by the war in Ukraine, are exposing the volatility of our global energy system and making the transition towards renewable energy even more urgent than before. The EU and many member states have shifted much of the responsibility for managing this transition onto the shoulders of local authorities, hoping for them to drive innovation and generate public acceptance through more participatory governance and stakeholder involvement. Indeed, the EU’s ‘Clean Energy’ package has designated local energy communities (LECs) that innovate, co-produce and share energy to receive stronger government support. However, the exact role of local authorities in launching, steering and upscaling these communities remains uncertain, as do their capacities and mandates for fulfilling that role. This further raises the question to what extent local authorities are positioned to coordinate and steer the energy transition process at the local level or else need to rely on market actors to carry out the task. Our contribution addresses this question by investigating the role of local administrations in running and upscaling four LEC pilot projects involved in the international ACCESS research project. Drawing on the scholarly literature around ‘network governance’, we conduct qualitative case into these pilots to identify their governance modes, mechanisms, and capacities, their collaboration with private stakeholders, and their encountered challenges, lessons, and long-term plans for upscaling renewable energy innovations. Two of our cases are based in Amersfoort (the Netherlands) and West-Suffolk (UK) and involve energy co-production between, respectively, private households and local businesses. The other two pilots are based in Mechelen (Belgium) and Malmö (Sweden) and involve rethinking parking buildings as mobility hubs with, a.o. electric vehicle charging infrastructure. Our qualitative data is drawn from conducting semi-structured interviews with local administrators, politicians, and businesses involved in the pilots, participating in local events organized by the pilots, and analysing documents such as pilot meeting minutes, local policies and energy transition plans. Our findings demonstrate that, notwithstanding national differences in energy systems and policies, local authorities perform very similar coordination functions in all four LECs, procuring construction and technology services and facilitating collaboration between participating businesses. Given their limited resources and decision-making authority, local administrations largely view their role as ‘early adopters’ of energy innovation, tasked with demonstrating the feasibility and business case of LECs before relying on the private sector to drive future upscaling and replication. However, many businesses express the need for ongoing collaboration with and policy guidance by local authorities, while large energy network operators appear disinterested in supporting LECs to scale up. These conflicting stakeholder interests, we argue, reveal an underlying tension regarding the division of labour between public and private actors, as well as between actors operating on different scales (grid owners vs. local authorities), in driving the transition to renewable energy. Resolving this may require more proactive involvement of local authorities and policy-makers in steering the development of LECs, which in turn would require strengthening their capacities and political mandates.