Securing Energy Justice Through Metrics Across Sectors: Deconstructing Positive Energy District Cases

Positive Energy Districts (PEDs) are regarded as a necessary, even desirable, solution to accelerate progress on urban climate targets. They refer to making block level areas at the sub-urban scale ‘carbon negative’ or ‘energy positive’ by producing more clean energy than they consume within the locality. This often entails installing renewable energy capacity, typically solar panels, but can also include other energy vectors such as heat, using circular economy principles to re-use waste heat, e.g. from industry in grid heating for households. This paper draws on diverse examples of PEDs based on ongoing engagement on a Driving Urban Transitions project: a cooperative building housing small enterprises in Budapest with solar panels and energy efficiency measures, a public-private collaboration in Stavanger across industries and a lagging neighbourhood of a municipality that is among Europe’s 112 Mission Cities, and an aggregation approach to renewable energy communities around Graz in Austria’s Styria region. Insights are based on project meetings with experts planning and carrying out these PEDs and detailed site visits during 2024. The diverse PED cases are analysed in terms of the measures they require to fulfil technical PED definitions, as well as from a more broadly contextualised perspective in terms of energy justice. These are site-specific interventions that shift socio-material relations in quite particular ways that the paper argues cannot be reduced to carbon emission reduction alone. Rather, the reconfiguration of energy solutions has evident justice implications that exhibit different degrees of desirability for actors with highly varying degrees of power and authority. The PED framing privileges certain actors and interests, with contrasting implications for energy justice in the PED cases across these three contexts. Additionally, these implications are determined by what metrics are associated with PEDs. Rather than a reductive framing of metrics to focus on carbon emission reductions in one sector, taking a wider approach to consider multiple sectors and actors in one energy system affords opportunities to define and develop fit-for-purpose metrics. These are proposed for each case and context, and the range is used as a basis to propose a preliminary typology of cross-sectoral metrics for PEDs that advance energy justice as an integral part of interventions to secure just transitions.