Testing Energy Futures and Citizenship in a Community Micro-Grid

To achieve a low-carbon society based on renewable energy sources, innovation is considered a key enabler to meet the 2050 targets. In the electricity sector, innovations are increasingly being tested in so-called ‘real-world conditions’, under the assumption that participating publics will help reinforce their robustness, and test their effectiveness and legitimacy. This experimental, co-creative approach to innovation has recently been analyzed from a co-productionist perspective, complementing existing studies by arguing that these experiments reconfigure society around certain technologies and related envisioned futures (Engels et al. 2019; Pfotenhauer and Juhl 2017). In short, what is at stake in these experiments is as much the technical as the social order. In this paper, I analyze the way in which energy futures are imagined through Mérygrid, a community-micro grid pilot project located in Southern Belgium uniting a group of companies to produce electricity that would be consumed collectively and locally. The renewable energy community was empowered by smart grids and operated in relative isolation from the distribution system. I examine the regime of techno-economic promises that shaped this project by asking what drove its members to imagine themselves as a community, and what energy citizenship resulted. While energy citizenship often refers to a heightened awareness for climate change that could induce collective organization to consume in a community energy (Devine-Wright, 2006), in this case the promise of increased competitiveness for participating companies involved a minimum of human implication, overturned existing visions based on solidarity among energy consumers, and achieved a community of economic interests reserved for a few. Merygrid was yet considered a successful proof of concept insofar as it was able to function as a carrier of meaning and values of what is perceived as good for the future of a Region hit by deindustrialization.