The Social Life of Energy

Dear reader,

Imagine a future in which we’ve moved decisively to sustainable energy sources and not only that – imagine that that transformation was managed and owned to a large extent by citizens, banded together in cooperatives, foundations and not-for-profit companies. How would that transition have happened?

To answer (parts of) that question, I talked to geographers Emma Folmer (University of Groningen) and Benedikt – or Ben, for Social Life of Energy readers – Schmid (University of Freiburg). They used their research into community-based and community-oriented initiatives to jointly tackle the question: is systemic change possible, through the many thousands of citizens’ seemingly “small” and “local” blooming flowers?

This question thus marks a shift in this series on social entrepreneurship in sustainable energy: from a discussion mostly of properly commercial companies to straight-up community initiatives – or what Emma calls “collective entrepreneurship”. Here are the main points you’ll find in this edition:

* Social enterprises are little engines of innovation

* Governments can foster this innovation in small and (cost-) effective ways

* An engineering-type perspective on scale and efficiency has fundamental laws

* Collective entrepreneurship can be a constitutive part of a vital democracy

Curious? Read on for the executive summary (and read more in the transcript), or tune in to the full interview by clicking on the play button on the top of this email or by firing up The Social Life of Energy in your favourite podcasting app!

Off-the-grid homes and on-the-grid vehicles

What needs to happen for systemic change? Well, two things at least: replication (or “roll-out” – but we’ll get to that) and institutional change that can accommodate new ways of doing things. Let’s start with the latter. What does that look like in the case of community enterprise – and what does its absence look like?

Among the 24 initiatives in and around Stuttgart that Ben talked to for his PhD research, there was a group of people who wanted to build off-the-grid (tiny-esque) homes. Off-the-grid means self-sufficient and that includes (potable and waste) water. However, homes in Germany are required to link to up the sewage system, and if somehow you want to organize your own drinking water, you need to get certifications that your water is actually safe. Getting the approval to delink, and obtaining the certification for potable water proved tricky. First of all, the group needed to work with several authorities with overlapping jurisdictions. And while they actually did have supporters in local government, others couldn’t care less about the project. Meanwhile, despite their support, administrators had to work with an ambiguous legal framework and they were hesitant to make executive decisions in that gray space.

OK, so from this super brief case study, let’s take stock for a sec. You have a couple of people trying to do new things that don’t fit any established categories – you know, innovation. In part, “not fitting” means there is literally no category for it: say, “off-the-grid” living. But it also means there is no process for it: the existing authorities and their jurisdictions were erected in and for another world. Attempts to re-make that world require new (regulatory) cooperation to survive.

For an example of how that might go, let’s turn to Emma’s main example.

It revolves around a cooperative community in the Netherlands that had installed rooftop solar panels on a parking lot. That process had gone fairly smoothly so they set their sights on something higher: to turn the parking lot into a EV charging station. That went much less smoothly. Same story: different state authorities, which were initially hesitant to give the green light, because of the same kind of regulatory uncertainty. But then a break: the national government launched a subsidy program for precisely these sort of EV charging car parks, which emboldened the municipality to take the plunge. To their credit too, they immediately addressed the problem of multiple jurisdictions by appointing a sort of case manager who acted as the main interlocutor for the initiative and others like it.

Now: what do these examples say about accommodation through institutional change?

Institutional change – cross-sectoral collaboration?

Maybe it’s good to first note that this sort of accommodation is different from the co-creation we saw last week: the collaborative networks assembled for the sake of larger infrastructural projects. Instead, the process of change is initiated by groups who are trying to make something they believe in financially viable. Viable, not necessarily profitable in any conventional sense. Hence, there is also no imperative to grow, as in many conventional markets. The bottom-line is just that: a foundation to stand on, not an horizon to chase. Finally, people do this mostly on the side, not as professionals. So, it’s understandable that governments are unsure about how to work with them.

The municipality’s choice to appoint a specialized contact person is therefore a valuable move because 1) it creates an interface at which different state institutions can learn to work together, and 2) it simplifies things considerably for citizens. That kind of simplification that can go a very long way. (That being said, the EV charger initiative actually also designated their own contact point, someone who could go to night school to learn Bureaucracy. (Also a good idea.)

The efficiency of scale – but what efficiency?

For a meta-twist in the story, though, Emma mentioned she also talked to a commercial provider of EV-charging stations about this case. While the representative was sympathetic to the initiative, he also ultimately dismissed its significance given the magnitude of our collective challenge to decarbonize mobility. What we need, according to him, was an actor with the financial and logistical wherewithal to roll out an EV-charging grid over the whole country. It’s just more efficient.

Let’s call this the central planning perspective: it allows you to see society as a machine, and landscapes as a flow-chart. While in the right hands perhaps a useful point of orientation, if you don’t realize its limits, you’re in for some nasty IRL surprises. With wind, we’ve seen that trying to roll out ‘efficiently and at scale’ is actually quite inefficient, because it doesn’t create space for self-determination and thus generates its own opposition. Projects strand. Efficiency null.

But the question of efficiency is bigger than that. What do we really call efficient? Co-creation with and by citizens – admittedly in its best cases – can produce solutions that synergize with other planning challenges that both local governments and citizens can bring to the fore. An “efficient” roll-out of central plans would completely miss such efficiencies at lower ‘scales’ though, because they’re simply invisible at higher scales. 

The question of efficiency is also deeper. Both Ben and Emma emphasize that community undertakings generate more than the product, service or piece of material infrastructure they were called into being for. Emma:

it also creates people's understanding of the problem, their willingness to invest in changing their behaviour. It helps people be part of a change, to enhance their sense of self-efficacy, to be part of the energy transition – that's also democratizing. That is a social value in itself.

That’s a lot of output for relatively little government input. However, we haven’t found good ways of measuring such value and so it’s easy to remain out of sight. That’s why we should be having more conversations about how valuable it is – and re-evaluate how much value conventional markets generate.

Oh and actually, what scale?

Ben remarked that we’re easily fooled by the small scale of the individual initiative. It looks insignificant. But these initiatives are not alone. Ben:

Communities are doing a lot of similar things in a lot of different places. That's also a form of scaling: there’s a kind of congruence – and they don't even necessarily have to be connected or networked.

It may be a quiet revolution. And we can hasten it by encouraging interconnections and replications. Among his 24 case-studies, Ben already saw a lot of cooperation and exchange taking place. Governments can help these initiatives by creating and fostering platforms for collaboration.

Complexity and learning

This is in fact the main message I take away from our conversation: policy makers and civil servants should treat this amorphous field of community enterprise as one giant laboratory of innovation. As Emma pointed out, it’s just like with ordinary entrepreneurs: “For every successful enterprise that you see there have been X number of failed enterprises going before it.” After much experimentation, someone finds the magic formula. So:

If you equip these groups of people with information, with know-how, with self-efficacy, this empowers people on a local level, right? To create change, even if small. But if we have many, many changemakers, together, connected and cumulatively, they will definitely help us forward.

And as Mariana Mazzucato has shown: the state is (or rather: can be) the entrepreneurial entity par excellence. And I guess that works with billion Eurodollar strategic investments as much as with small helping and guiding hands.

How, exactly? While I’d love to answer that question, I’ve gone on for too long already 😬. But please talk to Emma (LinkedIn) and Ben (Twitter) about it. In one sentence though: create space for experimentation (like ‘sandboxes’), promote learning networks, support in small financial ways, and find the courage to chart one’s own path in unknown legal seas. 

That’s all folks. You can keep up to date about Emma’s work through the CREDS’ project Social Entrepreneurship at the Grid’s Edge, and you can read all about Ben’s work in his book Making Transformative Geographies.

That’s also it for 2021, see you in the next year!

Happy holidays and take care 👋,

Marten

Hello everyone,

continuing my report on ‘webinars about what collaboration looks like in social innovation’. Today, I’m sharing insights from a keynote at the Social Innovation in the Energy Transition conference. The presentation was delivered by a scholar who I presume needs no introduction: Patrick Devine-Wright. (If you need an introduction, start here.)

You can also listen to today’s edition. I start off with the previous edition on Jamie Cross’ presentation, so if you missed that one, you’re in luck! If you didn’t, fast forward to a little over halfway.

Devine-Wright of course is known for DESTROYING the notion of NIMBYism by pointing out how resistance was often due to a lack of adequate participation in decision-making processes. But the notion was also a reason to start thinking about people’s attachment to a place – and how that might be a positive force in participation, rather than ground for rejection (‘my place doesn’t deserve your wind turbines’). His research on participation has kind of naturally evolved towards the idea of social innovation as an example of the good kind of participation, and yes, “place” helps to understand why these approaches can work! So, let’s take a closer look.

To start off, what does ‘social innovation’ mean for Devine-Wright? Well, for him it is basically a gloss for “co-creation”. Co-creation means taking people seriously, not only by actually listening to them, but by sharing power over the course of shared effort. In an earlier presentation this year for the SHIFT project, Devine-Wright specified some basic rules about what that means. It means that people’s input

* has to be organized early,

* it has to be substantial,

* it has to be actually implemented, and

* even defended if the results come up to resistance from, say, local administrators.

So what can attention to place and people’s attachments to place add to these stipulations?

“A world of places”

That phrase by sociologist Tim Cresswell means that for us human beings, places matter and places differ: ‘we look out from them’. That maybe sounds a bit fluffy, but in a very down-to-earth sense, it means that places have histories: people have experienced things there (ranging from the first forays into romance, to daily strolls with the dog, to (perhaps ill-conceived) roll-outs of rehabilitation projects). These experiences inform how people respond to new ideas and propositions, and they shape their willingness and ability to come up with their own ideas and propositions. If you therefore want to set something in motion, you won’t be able to get around these idiosyncrasies of places, so best to understand them, work with them, and build on them.

Alright, so now that you have the basic gist of social innovation and place, let’s see how we can put these two together in practice!

Zero Carbon Rugeley

An inspiring example comes from Rugeley, a town of nearly 25,000 just north of Birmingham. A town that has innovation in its genes, because it was the very place where the first telephone call via Telstar satellite was made! (Thank you, Wikipedia.) The project “Zero Carbon Rugeley” builds on this tradition and is turning the space of a decommissioned coal plant into a smart (and green) local energy district through a state-of-the-art process, involving:

* A multi-stakeholder partnership of private (energy) companies, a university, a theatre company (for animation), a solar cooperative, and more.

* An approach with co-creation at its heart: uniquely, a third of the budget was dedicated to “user-centric design”. Nor was that money to be spent by some lonely participation professionals either, but it cut across the whole project. This is a necessary prerequisite for participation to go beyond tokenism.

“Instead of ‘educating’ users and trying to sell them on some technology, we start with the people, their needs and then see what we could change accordingly”. (interviewee ZCR)

* An approach that takes local specificity seriously. Thus, it recognizes that Rugeley was already an energy place with its coal plant. In fact, trying to redevelop that site has made it more central to people’s perception of their history and heritage. So the guiding question became: can we build a narrative that will stitch the coal past to a zero-carbon future?

Place-making

Devine-Wright then offered some concepts to help understand why this particular approach is so valuable.

Firstly, when you propose to renovate a district, or upgrade the heating system, you are transforming a foundational framework through which how people experience themselves and the world. That should give pause to any well-meaning, enthusiastic policymaker or eager energy (heating) company. Tread lightly!

“You can’t just treat people as ‘users’, or ‘consumers’, or ‘adopters’. Because they are also denizens: dwellers in the place you are proposing to re-make”. (Devine-Wright)

In justice literature terms, we would say that not doing so would fail to recognize this part of people’s lives. And doing so can lead even the well-meaning to pave the road to planning hell.

This was actually the case recently in a town near Liverpool, which Devine-Wright also reviewed, where a shale gas fracking company wanted to develop a new site and chose to define community stakeholders in a very narrow, legalistic way, excluding people who lived in the same social space, but which happened to be across some jurisdictional boundary.

Those people outside the thus ill-defined community were left unrecognized. The consultation unmade their place for them. They were extricated from it. Conversely, Rugeley Zero Carbon tried to remake the town. People in Rugeley were asked to re-imagine and re-invest in their locality. To revive the history of Rugeley for a post-carbon future.

OST of the week, courtsey of R.E.M. 🕺

Wisdom sits in places

I imagine that for the well-intentioned, the following question can be a powerful guide to self-reflection: ‘Are we un-making place for people or letting them re-make it?’. At the same time though, co-creation is easier said than done. In fact, I’ve been thinking about this for this newsletter too: it feels like many of you know the theory, but it doesn’t always help improve your practice. So I wonder: would it help to see more case studies here? So see the complexities and learn from them, rather than understand the always simplified postulates? Let me know what you’d like!

Take care,

Marten

Know anyone who would be interested in knowing more about the value of place in social innovation? Don’t hesitate to share this newsletter!

PS Want to know more about co-creation from the SHIFT perspective? Check out this scientific publication, or this report written for a non-scientific audience, both written by Anatol Itten, Fionnguala Sherry-Brennan, Thomas Hoppe, Aarthi Sundaram, and Patrick Devine-Wright.

Together with Sherry-Brennan, Devine-Wright has also written about how tricky it is to draw a (necessary) perimeter around ‘the community’ of stakeholders in new development. I covered that article in “How to make sure locals benefit from new energy infrastructure”.

Below you’ll find the transcript of the podcast about the “Fit to Serve” social business model research. The conversation is in Dutch, so the transcript is as well, but if you’re really interested in subject matter, you might trying run this URL through translate.google.com or copy paste up to 5,000 characters at a time into https://www.deepl.com/translator. Of course, you can also get into contact with my interviewees, Ruth Mourik (contact info, LinkedIn) and Renske Bouwknegt (contact info, LinkedIn), directly.

Sociaal ondernemen in de energiesector

“De bedrijven die in staat zijn om daadwerkelijk een waarde te leveren aan mensen die niet per se zelf met energie te maken hoeft te hebben, maar waarbij de technologie een middel is om dat te bereiken, dus die echt op een dienst gedreven manier nadenken. Heel kort voorbeeld: in plaats van het aanbieden van een boormachine zorgen ze ervoor dat er het schilderij op de muur komt te hangen, waar de mensen willen dat het hangt. Dat is het verschil tussen product of dienst gedreven werken. En dat díe partijen die in staat zijn om dat schilderij op te hangen, dat dat degenen waren die veel succesvoller waren in het creëren van de markt, en ook de schaal van die markt dan? Partijen die de boormachine maar willen verkopen.”

Aan het woord is Ruth Mourik. Ruth is de oprichter van DuneWorks, het bedrijf waar ik werk. Zeg, wat doen we eigenlijk bij DuneWorks, Ruth?

Wij zijn op allerlei manieren bezig om de vraagstukken waar de energietransitie op vastloopt. Of van vraagstukken zijn, waarvan we denken dat die onvoldoende aandacht krijgen, die aanvliegen ,in een combinatie van onderzoeksprojecten, maar ook meer directe praktijk trajecten. Dus doen leren door te doen. Maar zeker ook onderzoeken en dan doen. Dat doen we in combinatie met heel veel verschillende partijen, van de Europese Commissie tot overheden in Nederland, universiteiten, hogescholen en bedrijven zoals Ideate!

Dat zij Ideate noemt is geen toeval, want samen met Ruth ben ik ook met Renske Bouwknegt van Ideate in gesprek gegaan over ondernemerschap in duurzame energie. Dit is deel van serie van ondertussen 6 nieuwsbrieven over dit onderwerp. Abonneer je als je ook de volgende edities in deze serie niet wilt missen.

Zoals ik uitleg in de vorige editie van de Social Life of Energy: op de lange termijn gaat duurzame energie het wel winnen van fossiele bronnen. De markten daarvoor komen op dit moment stukje bij beetje tot stand. Maar wat voor markten willen we eigenlijk? Welke waarden moeten we in het nieuwe systeem inbouwen? Dit zijn vragen die op heel concrete wijze uiterst prangend zijn voor ondernemers in dit veld:

* Wat is een goed energieproduct, of een goede energiedienst?

* Wanneer is goed 'goed genoeg'?

* Aan welke maatstaven kan ik mij meten? Er wordt van allerlei kanten aan mijn mouw getrokken: zijn er richtlijnen om mijn eigen koers uit te zetten?

* Wat kan ik verwachten? Een niche voor mijn bedrijf en mijn klanten, of kan ik helpen om systemische veranderingen in de hele energiesector teweeg te brengen?

Diensten aanbieden = relaties ontwikkelen

Voor ondernemers die dit soort vragen stellen, bieden Renske en Ruth het model van het relatie-gedreven ondernemerschap, waarbij niet een product verkocht wordt, maar een dienst wordt aangeboden.

Als je het terugbrengt en kijk naar het business model, dan zie je eigenlijk dat een dienst een relatie veronderstelt. Anders gezegd een dienst bestaat niet als die niet gebruikt wordt. En de bedrijven die succesvol zijn, die zijn ook heel goed gebleken in het continu en duurzaam vormgeven en onderhouden van die relatie.

Dat was Renske. Renske is dus partner in Ideate, een bedrijf dat… “verandering ontwerpt”.

Ja, Ideate is een is een sociaal ontwerpbureau en dat houdt zoveel in dat die die complexe vraagstukken, zoals die energietransitie, dat wij daar als ontwerpers mee aan de slag gaan. Dat betekent dat wij vanuit onderzoek, begrip van het vraagstuk, altijd op zoek gaan naar oplossingen in de zin van ‘hoe kan het? Hoe zou het wel kunnen? Hoe kan het anders?’ Dus wij geven eigenlijk vorm aan die verandering. We doen allerlei experimenten, leren daarvan en implementeren vervolgens die oplossingen.

OK, relaties. Die zijn dus de kern van hun idee van het ethisch of sociaal ondernemerschap.

Renske: Dat betekent dat ze ook continu hun activiteiten als het ware allemaal in dienst zetten van het onderhouden en vormgeven en waarde toevoegen aan die relatie. En in die relatie gedreven basismodellen waar wij naar kijken is het een continue co-creatie zou je kunnen zeggen van waarden.

Een belangrijke term voor hun begrip van wat sociale ondernemers doen is daarom ook “meervoudige waardecreatie”. Voorbij het monetair gewin ook aandacht hebben voor andere waarden zoals:

Renske: De waarde duurzaamheid, de gemeenschap onderhouden, onafhankelijkheid…”

En niet alleen waarde voor het bedrijf maar ook waarde voor anderen:

Ruth: Dat er expliciet ook gezocht wordt naar het creëren van waarde voor de maatschappij en soms ook zelfs generaties voorbij de onze. Dus niet alleen voor het hier en nu, maar ook het straks een en elders. En dat dat dat maakt dat ze in die zin ook echt wel transitie business modellen zijn.

Met transitie-business modellen bedoelt Ruth het volgende: vaak moeten ondernemers noodgedwongen op zoek naar creatieve manieren om ruimte te maken voor hun onderneming en hun verdienmodel, omdat de markt, de klanten, de regelgeving, de financiële instellingen er eenvoudigweg niet op ingesteld zijn. Sommige ondernemers blijken daarin heel goed te zijn, in het vinden van het achterdeurtje, de maas in de wet - vaak samen met hun cliënten, banken of overheden. Zo helpen zij eigenlijk mee een bredere maatschappelijke verandering in te zetten – een transitie, wellicht. Ruth en Renske noemen dat soort volhardende creatievelingen “institutionele ondernemers”.

Het onderzoek

We gaan zo een aantal voorbeelden van bedrijven bespreken, maar misschien is het wel zo handig om eerst te horen waar die voorbeelden eigenlijk vandaan komen. Dat zit namelijk zo: Ruth en Renske hebben gedurende 5 jaar voor het Internationaal Energie Agentschap hier onderzoek voor gedaan. Dat kwam zo:

Ruth: Wat ons jaren geleden eigenlijk enorm opviel, dat is dat er natuurlijk ontzettend veel urgentie is om aan de energietransitie te werken, dus je zou denken dat er een enorme markt is en daar ontzettend veel bedrijven heel succesvol in kunnen ondernemen. Maar op de een of andere manier was het continu eigenlijk ook wel in allerlei gesprekken duidelijk dat er ontzettend veel technologie ontwikkeld wordt die zijn weg niet vindt naar de markt. Dus wij vroegen ons af: ‘wat is dat dan? Wat houdt die bedrijven tegen? Heeft dat met het bedrijf te maken? Heeft het met technologie te maken? Heeft het met de ondernemer zelf te maken of met de markt?’ Wat zorgt ervoor dat al die beloftevolle oplossingen voor de problemen die we hebben hun weg niet vinden naar de markt. Dat was eigenlijk de geboorte van dit onderzoek. Alweer zeven of acht jaar geleden.

Wat hebben jullie precies gedaan in het kader van het onderzoek?

Ruth: We hebben geprobeerd om met zoveel mogelijk verschillende type bedrijven te kijken waar ze tegenaan liepen, hoe ze in elkaar staken, in verschillende landen. Ook geprobeerd te begrijpen wat die context van het land is, of bepaalde elementen van dat land, die cultuur, politiek, et cetera, ook van invloed zijn op hoe die bedrijven zich ontwikkelen. We hebben het onderzoek in twee fases uitgevoerd. In de eerste fase hebben we uiteindelijk in een zes of zevental landen, inclusief zelfs Korea, gekeken naar bedrijven die op de een of andere manier een product of een dienst leverde in bijvoorbeeld renovatie of licht als een service, warmte – en geprobeerd op die manier voor voldoende diversiteit in het aantal onderzocht cases te zorgen. Maar ook voldoende soortgelijke cases over landen heen om te zien wat voor patronen daaruit kwamen. In de eerste fase hebben we ruim 40 van die cases op die manier onderzocht. In een viertal categorieën: waaronder dus renovatie, licht als een service, warmte als een service en totaaloplossingen. En dat hebben we gedaan door met die mensen in gesprek te gaan. We hadden nationale experts in elk land en daar hielden interviews mee, volgens een template.

Vervolgens hebben we ook in al die landen een terugkoppel-workshop gehouden met de ondernemers, maar ook met beleidsmakers. Uit die eerste fase kwam al vrij snel een duidelijk patroon van manieren om je business te oriënteren. Van die push-harder strategie waarin bedrijven alleen maar harder drukt zonder iets met de technologie te doen, tot echt heel dienst-gedreven modellen. En in de tweede fase wilden we snappen, want we zagen bij die dienst gedreven modellen ook nog wel wat modellen die, ondanks het feit dat ze heel dienst gedreven waren toch op verschillende manieren een beetje vastliepen. Dat had vaak te maken met het feit dat ze eigenlijk best wel hele grote dingen probeerden te veranderen, ook in het systeem en bij wilden dragen aan de energietransitie, dus eigenlijk de transitie dienstbaar wilden zijn. Dus waar liepen die nou eigenlijk meer vast in? Dus daar hebben we ook weer een twintigtal cases op eenzelfde manier onderzocht, dus geïnterviewd, workshops gehouden en met een behoorlijk brede kwalitatieve dataset patronen proberen te vinden en te herkennen.

Uit die grote pool van bedrijven die ze hebben gesproken gaan we er drie uitkiezen om, in de komende 15 à 20 minuten, de verschillende typen verdienmodellen en ondernemingen aanschouwelijk te maken – dus we beginnen bij een bedrijf dat meer product-georiënteerd is en dus nog niet die langdurige relatie met de klant aangaat, dan gaan we door naar een ander bedrijf dat wel dat contact behoudt en zich zo langzamerhand van een product-bedrijf naar een dienstenbedrijf ontwikkelt, en ten slotte een onderneming die niet alleen diensten aanbiedt, maar ook pro-actief met allerlei partijen het gesprek aangaat om de weg te banen voor haar verdienmodel.

Alright, roll the tape!

Marten: Het is misschien een aardig idee om eerst te beginnen, eigenlijk met een wat meer traditionele manier van werken en een manier van ondernemen in de energie sector. Dus een voorbeeld van wat meer productgericht bedrijf. Renske, ik weet niet of jij een voorbeeld zou kunnen geven van zo'n bedrijf en hoe dat dan, hoe die opereert en waar die misschien ook dus tegenaan loopt.

Renske: Nou, zeker in de eerste fase van ons onderzoek hebben we best wel veel van dit soort bedrijven gezien. We hebben businessmodellen uit meerdere landen bestudeerd en wij hebben heel veel ondernemers ontmoet inderdaad, zoals Ruth al aangaf vanuit een sterk, vanuit hun technologie en vaak ook met een gepassioneerd technisch hart een product ontwikkelen en dat in de markt zetten. Zo hebben we een ondernemer ontmoet die heel veel verstand had van koelingsinstallaties, airconditioninginstallaties in gebouwen. En die had een manier gevonden om die koelinstallaties te optimaliseren. En dat was van groot belang, omdat dat leidt tot een behoorlijke energiebesparing. Maar hij raakte gefrustreerd dat zijn potentiële doelgroep, zijn klanten, daar eigenlijk weinig interesse in hadden. En wat deed hij? Hij ging heel hard aan de slag met sales en marketingspecialisten om nog harder te roepen hoe goed hij eigenlijk was en wat voor een slimme innovatie hij had om die installaties te verbeteren en te optimaliseren. En hij kreeg het niet voor elkaar. In een workshop met deze man kwamen we er op een gegeven moment ook achter, eigenlijk is hij continu aan het vertellen aan zijn eindgebruiker – daar begon het eigenlijk al mee – dat zij dus het niet zo goed deden. Dat vinden mensen misschien wel niet zo leuk om te horen. Dus met deze man aan het werk gaan om zijn ongetwijfeld optimale slimme dienst om die op een andere manier in dienst te stellen van de uitkomsten voor zijn eindgebruikers: de huurders van die panden of de verhuurders van die panden. Om in dienst van die uitkomsten, om op die doelen die die klanten nastreven te stellen je businessmodel in te richten. Met andere woorden dus hoe je die relatie vormgeeft, door samen te werken met die eindgebruiker, daar moest die man veel voor aanpassen in zijn bedrijf. Maar iets anders dan nog harder duwen en roepen – pushing harder zoals wij dat hebben genoemd – van zijn propositie. En dergelijke voorbeelden hebben we veel gezien, ja.

Marten: Ja, dat klinkt het wel frapperend dat hij bij die technologie, bij die oplossing, inderdaad begon en van daaruit wilde hij dus naar de klant toestappen en vertellen over waar dat product goed voor was voor die klant, in plaats van bij de klant te beginnen en kijken naar wat voor de vraag of probleem de klant had en hoe eventueel dat die technologie daarbij zou passen. Vond ik dat zo goed samen?

Renske: Dat vat je goed samen en dat vraagt dus, als je denkt in termen van een relatie ondersteunen of een relatie vormgeven, dan vraagt het dus te begrijpen van oké, hoe gebruikt die eindgebruiker eigenlijk nu zijn pand? Wat voor wat voor een rol heeft koeling daar eigenlijk binnen? Hoe kijkt die man of vrouw, die eigenaar van het pand, aan tegen duurzaamheid? Hoe oriënteert iemand zich op een op een koelinstallatie? Wat is optimalisatie voor zo'n klant? Dus het is allemaal gesprekken en en eigenlijk onderzoek wat hij moet doen om te begrijpen hoe hij en of uberhaupt en hoe vervolgens zijn installatie of zijn optimalisatie dienst daar onderdeel kan zijn van die relatie, of die relatie misschien zelfs wat waardevoller kan maken. Dat is de essentie denk ik. En het klinkt zo simpel. En toch zie je het zoveel nog steeds terug.

Dan: het voorbeeld van een bedrijf dat de overstap maakt naar een dienst werd door Ruth gegeven.

Ruth: Er zijn veel mooie voorbeelden, maar misschien wel een zeer verhelderend voorbeeld is een bedrijf in Ierland. En dat begon ooit met eigenlijk gewoon handige, slimme stopcontacten voor kantoorgebouwen. En dat waren stopcontacten waar je ook nu eens USB in kon stoppen, allerlei connecties op kon maken, et cetera. Dat bedrijf was redelijk succesvol daarin. Maar wat ze zo anders maakt dan een product gedreven bedrijf, dat is dat ze eigenlijk continu ook wel in gesprek bleven. Dus die relatie bleven onderhouden. Ze bleven juist na de transactie, dus nadat het bedrijf de stopcontacten had gekocht, in contact met hun klanten om te vragen van ‘Goh, hoe werkt het? Gaat het goed? Kunnen we eens langskomen?’ En door dat contact zo goed te onderhouden en te kijken wat er ook allemaal op de werkvloer gebeurde, kregen ze al snel inzicht in het feit dat licht en het op de juiste manier belichten van allerlei werkzaamheden en activiteiten een belangrijk ding is. En dat het vervangen van armaturen en een lamp eigenlijk niet de kernwens van de klant was. Ze wilden licht.

Dus wat die uiteindelijk zijn gaan doen is nadenken over hoe ze licht als een service konden gaan aanbieden. Er waren daar natuurlijk al voorbeeld modellen van, maar daar bleef het dan ook weer niet bij. Want op het moment dat klanten gingen nadenken over dat licht, gingen ze ook nadenken over waar de energie vandaan komt en wilden ze misschien ook wel die energie zelf gaan opwekken? En is dat bedrijf dus ook in de PV-panelen gestapt. Wat dit zo'n mooi voorbeeld maakt is dat dit een bedrijf is wat continu in die relatie bleef investeren; ze conceptualiseerden wat het haalde uit het die gevoeligheid [voor de klant] en het wisten dat om te zetten in een continue businessmodel innovatie ten dienste van de klant. En natuurlijk deden ze daar financieel heel goed op. Maar dit is anders dan wanneer je dus iets pusht en je bedenkt en dan de markt op gaat, maar volgend op de wensen en de ontwikkelingen van de klant eigenlijk meebeweegt en daar steeds een antwoord op weet te formuleren. Dat is wel de essentie van een dienst gedreven bedrijf.

Dit is dus nog niet een bedrijf dat zelf op stap moet gaan om openingen te creëren voor zijn verdienmodel. Voor een voorbeeld hiervan geef ik Renske weer het woord.

Renske: Ja, gelukkig hebben we best wel veel, ook van dit soort voorbeelden gezien. We hebben een ondernemer uit Eindhoven gevonden die eigenlijk tegen zijn klanten ziekenhuizen, scholen, dat soort type bedrijven of organisaties, heeft hij steeds gezegd van ‘Nou, ik kan ervoor zorgen dat jij aan de duurzaamheidseisen die worden opgelegd voldoet door jouw installatie te vervangen door een duurzame installatie met en die installatie neem ik op mijn balans en ik zorg ervoor dat de kosten die het jou oplevert lager zijn dan de kosten die je nu betaalt voor je energierekening’. Je zou denken een soort no brainer he? Daar zou iedere klant voor moeten gaan. Maar hij liep gaandeweg het uitwerken van zijn bedrijf en zijn business model toch tegen allerlei problemen op. Bijvoorbeeld, dan had hij het uitonderhandeld met de directeur van een organisatie en dan moest hij met de technisch verantwoordelijke binnen de organisatie schakelen en die zei, ‘ja maar wacht effen. Mijn installatie is nog lang niet afgeschreven, dus ik ga dit niet doen’. En dan moest hij ineens ander gesprek voeren. Of hij kwam een accountant tegen die zei ‘Ja, dat kan jij nou wel willen. Maar als jij die installatie op jouw balans zet, het kan ik niet verwerken in mijn boeken, dus dat gaat niet gebeuren.’ Of hij zei er kwam een bank tegen, dan zei de bank ‘Dat is allemaal leuk bedacht, maar ik kan dit niet financieren.’ En hij was continu in staat om met al die verschillende partijen te schakelen, dus om de taal zich eigen te maken en dus de taal te spreken van de personen die hij tegenover zich had. Door met de accountant te gaan zitten en te gaan kijken van ‘Oké, laten we nou eens kijken hoe het misschien wel kan’. De mensen die bij de bank hiervoor verantwoordelijk waren ging hij trainen om ze te leren wat de constructie precies inhoudt en wat het betekende - en zo dus ook de bank achter zich kreeg en die het wilde financieren.

En zo wist hij eigenlijk alle hobbels in het systeem op te sporen en stuk voor stuk eigenlijk op hun eigen terrein als het ware, door er mee samen te werken, wiste hij de hobbels weg te nemen. En nou ja, hij was succesvol in de regio, ook geen grotere ambities want hij kon de vraag niet aan, maar wel, en dat is denk ik een belangrijke toevoeging hierin, heel veel werk doen op dat gebied. Ook een beetje omdat hij de partijen die het werk misschien voor hem zouden moeten doen, of die de weg voor hem een stukje makkelijker zouden moeten maken, het laten afweten. Dus hij verwacht eigenlijk veel van onder andere de overheid om regels gewoon aan te passen aan dit soort constructies, bijvoorbeeld. Maar dat zijn buitengewoon trage processen. Of dat er op scholen al veel vroeger onderwezen wordt om een technisch verantwoordelijke ook wat business taal te leren, bijvoorbeeld. Het zijn maar kleine zaken, maar zodat er aan de fundamenten van zo'n systeem dat eigenlijk gericht is op het ondersteunen van die transacties om aan die fundamenten wat te doen, zodat het ook de relatie- en service-ondersteunende businessmodellen die in die transitie zo belangrijk zijn, om die ook wat meer te ondersteunen en de ontwikkeling ervan een meer te ondersteunen.

Stel, u, waarde luisteraar, u bent geïnspireerd geraakt en u wilt ook zo aan de slag. Wat heeft u nodig?

Renske: Je hebt eigenlijk vier competenties nodig, dus je moet inderdaad. Het is heel erg belangrijk om heel goed aan te voelen wat die klant nodig heeft, maar je het gaat eigenlijk verder, want het gaat ook over de context van de klant, het context van het gebruik, maar die systemische voorwaarden. Dus het gaat echt om daar niet alleen onderzoek naar doen en een soort voortdurend contact mee hebben. Maar dan ook dat wat je daarvan leert en ophaalt aan inzichten, dat moet je ook weer voorzien van duiding, zou je kunnen zeggen. En je moet ook in staat zijn om dat te kunnen vertalen naar zeg maar nieuwe voeding voor die relatie die je ondersteunt. Dus je moet die dienst ook continu nieuw leven in kunnen blazen of weer een nieuwe niches, nieuwe waarde toevoegen dus die conceptualisatievaardigheid is net zo belangrijk.

Wij als designers zien een dienst ook altijd als een proces en eigenlijk moet je dat proces ook heel goed weten te orkestreren. Dus ieder stapje dat je zegt moet een logisch vervolg zijn op het stapje daarvoor en ook een voorbereiding op het stapje daarna. Dus je moet ook continu die orkestratie skill in beeld hebben en niet in de laatste plaats omdat dat ook vaak vraagt om veel meer samenwerking met partners, die je dus ook waar je het dus weer moet orkestreren en allemaal ook in dienst van die propositie of die relatie moet brengen.

Dus, als ik even mag onderbreken, in het geval het Ierse licht-als-dienst bedrijf moesten zij de zonnepanelen voor hun klanten “orkestreren”, oftewel:

in staat te zijn om je werk, voorbereiding en je proces zo goed mogelijk te stroomlijnen. Maar voor een klant is het bijvoorbeeld ontzettend vervelend wanneer je met twintig verschillende partijen te maken hebt, om uiteindelijk het systeem wat je graag functioneel wilt hebben functioneel te krijgen. Dus onderdeel van een orkestratie-competentie van zo’n dienst-gedreven bedrijf is ook dat zij als één stem feitelijk weet het te handelen en te spreken naar en met die klant. Dus dat wat er ook allemaal achter de schermen gebeurt, dat blijft bij de klant weg. Er is gewoon één aanspreekpunt en daar waren daar waren deze Ieren ook heel goed in.

Terug naar Renske:

En tot slot gaat het ook nog over het in staat zijn om je diensten ook op te schalen. Om in die markt continu te blijven vertalen, aan te passen,  doorontwikkelen. Dus al die vier competenties moeten eigenlijk aanwezig zijn en ontwikkeld worden om echt die switch te kunnen maken. Dus helaas is het niet een klein koekje wat je eet en dan huppetée, dan ben je een ineens in dienst gerichte ondernemer. Dat vraagt echt wel wat van de ondermemr.

Met andere woorden, het gaat niet om een gebruikerstestje hier en een marktonderzoekje daar. Maar, geïnspireerde luisteraar, weest niet bevreesd. Ruth en Renske hebben een website.

Renske: we hebben geprobeerd onze inzichten bijeen te brengen, alle cases, de analyse daarvan, onze inzichten in samenhang te verwerken. Dat is de website https://www.fittoserve.eu/. Daar kunnen ze ook een scan doorlopen om te kijken waar ze nu staan. Om te bepalen van, ben jij nou zo'n heel transitie gericht ondernemer? Zo'n institutioneel ondernemer? Of ben je toch nog wat meer een product-georiënteerde ondernemer? Dus dat is het denk ik een goede start om is om eens te beginnen.

Overheden als ook een beetje institutionele ondernemers

Maar ho! Transities kunnen niet alleen door ondernemers gedragen worden.

Ruth: Sterker nog, wat we nu toch wel heel vaak zien is dat het dat soort van ondernemers zijn die hun nek uitsteken en het risico lopen, terwijl ze iets proberen te doen wat we op maatschappelijk niveau eigenlijk zouden moeten willen bereiken. Dus het is ook gewoon feitelijk niet rechtvaardig, dat het de ondernemers zijn die dit zouden moeten aanjagen en trekken.

Er is dus een belangrijke rol voor overheden en de publieke sector weggelegd, waar Ruth en Renske ook aandacht voor vragen.

Ruth: Ja, je kunt bijvoorbeeld denken aan het feit dat juist overheden natuurlijk eigenlijk het best in positie zijn om die multi-stakeholders processen die dus nodig zijn om die meervoudige waarde en de dialoog over ieders rol eigenlijk het beste kan kan worden vormgegeven in zo'n transitie. Om die te faciliteren, want daar is over het algemeen geen eigenaar voor. Die die. Wie neemt het nou eigenlijk op zich? Omdat er van multi-stakeholder processen en dialoog te starten? Dus bij uitstek, zeggen wij, is dat een rol voor overheden.

We zitten midden in de transitie en we hebben eigenlijk, als we eerlijk zijn, per definitie dus geen idee wat het beste pad is, en waar we gaan uitkomen. Dat vraagt eigenlijk een totaal andere houding ten aanzien van leren en experimenteren. Je kunt geen lineair pad aflopen, wetende waar je uitkomt. Dat is onderdeel van een transitie: dat je dat met elkaar, in co-creatie, iteratief en soms met doodlopende straatjes en afslagen moet doen. Nou, daar heeft de overheid ook best wel wat werk aan de winkel. Zij kan ervoor zorgen dat de manier waarop zij bijvoorbeeld projecten financiert dat leren en dat experimenteren veel meer ook laat zijn en falen ook laat zijn. Er is heel mooi initiatief geweest een tijd geleden - “Briljante Mislukkingen” - waarin het oké was dat iets niet gelukt is, zolang je er maar van geleerd hebt en erover communiceert, zodat het niet nog een keertje fout zal gaan.

Maar er is bijvoorbeeld ook juist omdat we in die transitie zitten en natuurlijk ontzettend veel onenigheid en een gebrek aan een gemeenschappelijke taal. Waar hebben we het over als we het hebben over “efficiency” waar we het over als we het hebben over “warmtenetten”? Daar is zelfs al gewoon geen eenduidige definitie over, als je met experts praat. Juist dat aanjagen en zorgen dat we met z'n allen die taal met elkaar gaan ‘maken’ en begrijpen, zodat we in ieder geval vanuit gemeenschappelijke grond met elkaar in gesprek gaan. Ook daar zit weer bij uitstek een rol voor overheden.

Daarnaast moet er ook meer aandacht komen voor het denken en handelen in diensten in plaats van producten. Ook daar kan de overheid een rol in spelen.

Ruth: Dat hele systeem is eigenlijk ook ingericht om alleen maar om te gaan met producten en niet met die de relaties waar Renske het net over had of op basis van relaties. Dus subsidieregelingen, om maar een voorbeeld te geven, die zijn gericht op enkelvoudige producten zoals PV of een warmtepomp. Maar die denken niet na over hoe dat allemaal bij elkaar gebracht moet worden in een woning en wat dat allemaal betekent. En dus je hebt geluk als je voor twee maatregelen in je woning subsidie kunt aanvragen. Maar je kunt niet subsidieaanvraag voor het verduurzamen van je woning. Dat slaat toch nergens op?

Er is dus samenwerking nodig, samenwerking:

Renske: om gericht die procedures, wetten, regels en instituties als het ware ook te ontwikkelen, om elkaar goed te begrijpen om al die verschillende relaties vorm te kunnen geven en te voeden. Dus om toe te werken naar díe uitkomst.

Marten: Uitkomst-gedreven samenwerken?

Renske: Ja, absoluut, ja.

Waarde luisteraar, met deze laatste toevoeging over de voorwaarde van een zinvolle samenwerking zijn Ruth, Renske en ik aan het einde van ons gesprek gekomen. Wilt u meer weten, ga dan naar www.fittoserve.eu om alles nog eens in detail aan te kijken. Leert u graag meer over hoe we duurzame energietransitie kunnen… orkestreren? Abonneert u dan op deze nieuwsbrief, waarin ik de laatste inzichten van wetenschappers, onderzoekers en professionals samenvat.

Ruth en Renske: dank! 🙌

PS Ik heb dankbaar gebruik gemaakt van de volgende geluidseffecten:

* Stationsaankondiging

* Cassettedeck laden

* Band afspelen

Before starting off the newsletter proper, I’d like share some meta-reflections on the IPCC report:

Arthur Petersen (Prof. Science & Technology, UCL) is pleased:

Scientists are no longer afraid to tell it like it is: humans are causing the recent warming of the planet. They are more self-confident. But what also has changed is that people are more willing to listen to them. (in Dutch newspaper NRC)

But they’re not telling quite like it is. Emily Atkin (journalist, Heated newsletter):

if you only read the summary for policymakers, you’ll find out that human “activities” and “influence” are “unequivocally” causing climate disasters—but which activities and influences are the greatest will remain a mystery. It’s all just “Humans,” “emissions,” “activities,” and “influence.” You’ll learn the world is ending, and you will not know who to blame.

This is not so surprising, writes Robinson Meyer (journalist, the Atlantic), because the IPCC was called into being to deliver consensus science that global warming is indeed happening (to cut off political leaders looking for the easy, denialist exit of global cooperation). That task has its own virtue:

I find the IPCC reports quite beautiful, almost moving. The IPCC is a novel organization in world history: a group of volunteer scientists tasked with figuring out precisely what their field believes at the moment, a modern version of Diderot’s Encyclopedia.

You can also read about the ‘neutrality’ of the IPCC in this earlier SLE edition (about biofuels) and about the kind of forecasting work of it does here.

But now, let’s go back to examining how we can get business to heed the IPCC call!

Dear folks, welcome back to SLE's ongoing series on sustainable entrepreneurship. As a reminder, two questions drive the series:

* firstly, how are new energy markets established? How are products made and services designed, regulations complied with and new regulations lobbied for, customers found and prepped, and products and services sold?

* Secondly, can sustainable entrepreneurship, as a type of ethical entrepreneurship, create products and services that are actually doing good for their users and stakeholders? That is to say, in this world of deepening inequalities: do they help emancipate citizens, lift up the downtrodden?

The gist

The distinction between the first and second question is the distinction between the green economy and the social economy.

The green economy consists of those business models that do not add to pollution and ideally even straight-up reduce it. The social economy, by contrast, refers to business practices that do not aggravate and ideally reduce inequities.

Both face some market-making challenges: green entrepreneurs (last edition’s "ecopreneurs") need to convince money to follow new revenue streams, and very similarly social entrepreneurs (sociopreneurs?) need to convince money to flow away from the usual investment objects. But the one does not necessarily make the other. Tesla – in some sense – is a green business. It is not – in any sense – a social business.

But what if you want to be both? Great idea, couldn’t be more timely! For inspiration, we’ll do a case-study of one such socioecopreneur™: or, a person making a business case for cleaner energy and greater equity all at once. The case is Charlie Lord, who wants to combine decarbonization with a better life for people in vulnerable communities, by improving housing and creating new, local jobs to do it.

The case study, as well as the distinction between the social and green economy, and many more insights come from this week's reading:

Julia Affolderbach & Rob Krueger’s “Just” ecopreneurs: re-conceptualising green transitions and entrepreneurship. Published in Local Environment, in 2016.

The story

Charlie Lord is an environmental lawyer who finished his studies at the moment that indigenous, Black and Brown communities were causing scenes in the environmental movement of the time, condemning leadership for ignoring the effects of environmental pollution and destruction on vulnerable communities ‘at home’. Inspired by these critiques, Charlie Lord and college buddy Wlliam Shutkin started ACE in Massachusetts, an advocacy group that worked bottom-up to document environmental inequality and lobby or litigate for change.

After ACE “took a life of its own”, Lord moved on to address a gnawing problem: that ACE, as a non-profit organization, was there to pick up the pieces left behind by self-interested for-profit enterprises. Business, he felt, should be just as community-interested. He therefore started a company for ‘eco-innovation services’ (C-Quest Capital). It's worth copying Affolderbach and Krueger in full here:

His business plans look and feel very conventional to investors. For example, his recent venture, which is to do green retrofits in buildings over 35,000 sq/ft, gives investors the look and feel of a [conventional] real estate investment where investors expect in the neighbourhood of 10–14% return on their money. The building owners get a savings on their energy costs. Lord’s firm is working with the Boston Impact Initiative to ensure that for at least some of the projects, people in the community are trained for jobs and get experience doing “green” work. (11)

By converting regular investors into unwitting ethical investors, he hoped to take the social economy out of not-for-profit domain.

The why

At stake in his and others’ attempts is nothing less than the world we want. Arguably, the climate crisis demands that we come up with:

business models that are not driven by profit-maximisation and rational choice [alone] but by ethical considerations, alternative norms, and values. (2)

Business models that are not bound by non-financial values might wind up reproducing the same systemic conditions for inequalities and (natural) exploitation.

For an example, let's take a look again at last issue’s sustainable energy business, Sunrun.

Its foundational mission is to increase the adoption of solar. It therefore has to have a pretty solid financial pitch to (middle class) homeowners, for whom it can thus do good. However, it might not have much to offer to people in more vulnerable neighbourhoods or marginalized communities, where different property relations, local regulations, building suitability, lack of time and awareness necessary to sort things out, or low trust in financial systems constitute significant obstacles. Sunrun’s not being an evil capitalist pig, but its business model cannot address these issues and thus 'deliver on the good' for these potential customers.

So, the demand is to come up with business models that can.

Charlie Lord’s services are no different from those offered by other companies in the green building sector. What the environmental justice-driven approach has brought to the new business model is a revaluation of goals where venture capital in the form of environmental services is used as a means to achieve defined environmental justice outcomes (e.g. through social employment contracts with clients and a focus on disadvantaged and poor neighbourhoods). (10/11)

Affolderbach and Krueger’s response to the demand comes in the form of business models driven by environmental justice. Business models that redress (environmental and economic) inequalities and help the marginalized also attain a good life. That's perhaps the real challenge for the economy the coming decades. To figure out the economics of sustainable wellbeing, also on the level of business administration.

Now, the authors’ environmental justice 'framework' remains quite general. I'll be exploring how to specify this framework more, but if you know of more concrete leads do let me know (or everyone directly by commenting below)!

The ramble

Finally, the real challenge poses the ultimate question in transition studies: what can ethical entrepreneurship change? What is its impact? What does it transform? The social economy is perhaps by its very nature, for better and for worse, limited to local social change, always falling short of transformation. Sunrun, by contrast and by virtue of its for profit motive is more traditionally capitalist. It seeks to grow, break out of its niche, turn mainstream. There's potential transformative power bundled there. Meanwhile, the transformative potential of the social economy is perhaps best built and harnessed by policymakers, by recognizing and nurturing small-scale activities, allowing these activities to cast out seeds and multiply. Community energy looks like a great example of this. Structural support is even on its way, although, like all innovation, it’s complex, messy work.

👋

The series on sustainable entrepreneurship so far

* The (messy) work of innovation. Sunrun's Lynn Jurich on creating value.

* Making markets for sustainable energy. Or how to produce customers for solar lamps in West Africa.

* Recognition should be at the heart of the energy transition. Plus: build your own solar water heater!

Happy Monday, folks,

Some inspiration for a creative week.

What does it mean to ‘innovate’? Many look for the decisive mark of the singular genius or the cutting-edge company. Perhaps the best-known recent example is Elon Musk and Tesla. Not too long ago it was Steve Jobs and Apple. However, you might be familiar with Mariana Mazzucato’s retelling of Jobs’ (iPhone) story. In her reconstruction, she shows how all the constituent technologies of the iPhone – the HTTP protocol, GPS, LCD displays – were technologies developed with state support and often within public bodies. All fundamental innovation had happened previous to the iPhone.

While her analysis dispels the “I built that” theory of innovation, that still leaves (Jobs’ and Musks’) actual creativity unexplored, which is the art of assembling new technologies, ideas and (business) practices into a product or service that changes our world in a meaningful way.

We’ll talk about this creative work in today’s edition in my ongoing series on renewable energy markets. Two main questions drive the series: how are new markets made and what good can products and services do? Today, I’ll dwell mostly on that first question.

As a case study, I’ll take a look at Sunrun, the US solar-as-a-service company. I’ll base my examination on a conversation that co-founder (and current CEO) Lynn Jurich had with energy journalist David Roberts for his Substack newsletter Volts, which I recommend to you all, if you’re not already subscribed.

Here’s what to expect: first, a quick overview of how Sunrun can be considered innovative. Then, an analysis of what it actually entails to make Sunrun – and its business model – successful.

My analysis is directly inspired by this week’s reading: Beveridge, Ross, and Simon Guy. 2005. "The rise of the eco-preneur and the messy world of environmental innovation". Local Environment. 10 (6): 665-676.

Strap in, for the ride is now in motion.

Phase 1: Solar as a service

When Sunrun started out in 2007, they wanted to increase adoption of rooftop PV by reducing the upfront costs and the hassle of the paperwork. It did so by paying for the installation of the solar panels itself, becoming the energy provider for the home, offering lower energy bills than the current contract, and recouping the costs by selling the solar harvest. Sunrun was (among?) the first to offer this ‘Lease’ + ‘Power Purchase Agreement’ combo in consumer PV.

Phase II: Household energy management as grid service

Now batteries have entered the picture. Their steeply falling costs means it is now possible to perform the same trick as with rooftop PV. With batteries, Sunrun can recoup the costs with grid balancing and peak shaving. Batteries can respond near-instantly and importantly, they are installed locally, which means that can also help balance the distribution grid. In theory then, home (and EV) batteries build up to a “virtual power plant”, a plant that should be able to (ultimately) replace fossil fuelled “peaker plants” in the growing market for ‘flexible energy capacity’.

Street smarts: werk!

Right from the get-go, Jurich tells Roberts that she wants to make clear that she doesn’t just know the theory of sustainable energy business models, but that she has the “street smarts” to put them in to practice. That’s a great way of describing the actual work of collecting and arranging all the different  – social, legal, technical – ingredients of the business model.

Why would that require ‘street smarts’? There are obstacles in the way, like red tape and opposition or at least disinclination from utilities. It can also be difficult to reach homeowners, who might not know about this possibility, might be sceptical about its long-term value, fear drawbacks (like for comfort), and don’t upgrade their home very often to begin with, which means there’s a small window to catch them.

Alright, so what work are we talking about then?

Storytelling

Streets smarts is all about schmoozing. It’s about knowing how to sell a story. In this case: a story “about sustainability and possible future relationships between the environment and business” (674).

“We’re great at creating value for homeowners and utilities.”

Let’s take the examples of Sunrun’s main interlocutors: the electric utilities. To Roberts, they are the main obstacle for distributed energy generation. Why? Because most for-profit utilities make their money ‘selling’ the construction of new infrastructure to the state (much more than selling energy to their customers). So their interests are diametrically opposed to people taking infrastructure into their own hands (or homes, rather).

In response, Jurich tells a story of a world in which distributed infrastructure is no longer opposed to grid-scale infrastructure. In this world, there is enough to go around for everyone.

We need more abundant thinking: we can have a better experience for customers, and a more competitive distributed energy resources market. There’s no shortage of value to go around.

In other words, she’s saying, getting hung up on investment-based business model is a distraction. Instead, utilities could remove administrative barriers which wouldn’t cost them anything, but will save parties like Sunrun huge amount of “soft costs” and allow them to build out a market that will benefit everyone. We will need so much electricity in the future, everybody can win. Let’s not fight (over how infrastructural investments are going to be paid for).

In other words, she is inviting other actors into her vision.

Dissociation/association

Established ways of working are successful because the different ingredients have been made to work with another. To make room for new ways of working one needs to loosen the establishment’s grip on these ingredients. In Beveridge & Guy’s words:

How does [Sunrun] ‘disentangle’ users of traditionally sourced electricity from the web of relationships they have with the suppliers, consultants and engineers supporting it and then reassemble them in a new arrangement around [its] innovation? (674)

Sunrun’s Power Purchasing Agreement – itself new at the time – was meant to lure customers away from familiar fossil-centric home upgrades that had lower upfront costs. Home solar needed to become attractive and reducing upfront costs and hassle was one way to do that.

But it has also lured in the utilities. One of its earliest partnerships with them was to offer the tax credits reserved for home PV in exchange for cash-financing the installations (so-called ‘tax equity investment’). It was a way of unlocking large streams of money, especially just after the 2008 financial crisis, but it was also a way to get the utilities on board, disentangling them from their usual mode of operation.

It’s not just about disentangling though, it’s also linking things up.  

Take its recent partnership with Ford. The company has made Sunrun the preferred installer of home chargers for the all-electric version of its iconic pick-up, the F-150. Ford is betting on Americans’ undying love for this particular vehicle, and its place in popular culture is something Sunrun can capitalize on as well. Enrolling EVs in general into this business model makes financial, technological and social sense as well, since people want their cars to run on the sun (aaahh) and its battery can serve the house and the grid.  

The messy process of innovation

Loosening and linking does not come without friction. According to Beveridge and Guy, innovation is therefore all about the messy

interplay of competing discourses of business and the environment, the flow of national and local technology politics, the trade-offs, compromises, deals and conflicting visions. (672)

But there’s another sense to this messiness: the fact that the ingredients of new business models do not yet ‘align’ (the way they do in the established ways of working) and that it’s Sunrun’s interest and job to make sure they do. For distributed electricity generation and virtual power plants to ‘stick’, the process of putting them in place needs to be streamlined for everyone involved.

This comes to a head in a concept that seemed to dominate the discussion: soft costs.

Electric vehicles are a huge unlock for decarbonization but the customer experience can be confusing. There’s the utility, the dealer, the electrician and the manufacturer and many times they don’t really talk to each other. That’s what we’re great at: we can be the energy adviser. And from a business model standpoint: when you buy an EV, we put more panels on the roof, and that small increment in power is the cheapest to build. When you’re already spending time at the house, get the permit, get installers there, the extra panels are the cheapest on the grid.

As you can see, Sunrun is trying to 1) reduce messiness for customers (aiming at that one-click-buy™ equivalent for home electrification), 2) create a more compelling narrative for adoption of Ford’s EVs, and 3) by actualizing connections in their service, reduce friction for themselves and strengthen their business case by increasing generation capacity.

So there you go, that’s the theory of innovation-by-assembly! To close, I’ll let Jurich have the final, illustrative word:

Roberts: So basically you offer a full home electrification service.

Jurich: Yeah, we have the trucks, the labour, the sales force, the ability to tell what your utility bills will look like before and after, how it links up with the electric panel, roof and car. We educate and provide the service. That’s why Ford wanted to partner with us: we can make buying EVs easier.”

Hope you have a good week. More sustainable entrepreneurship to follow. Did you see anything amiss in this edition? Let me know!

Take care,

Marten

PS Not done reading yet?

If you missed the two earlier issues in this series:

* Making markets for sustainable energy. Or how to produce customers for solar lamps in West Africa.

* Recognition should be at the heart of the energy transition. Plus: build your own solar water heater!

Want to read more about innovation in clean energy?

* Let people make wind turbines. Helena Solman about fully involving people from imagining to maintenance.

* Consensus and conflict in innovation. A tale of three boundaries.

* The power and complexity of innovation

“As a nimby, you start researching and thinking critically. They are pushing through their principles, without sufficiently taking into account the well-being of citizens and the natural environment.” – Amsterdam activist against turbines (Volkskrant newspaper).

“The men are suspected to send threatening letters to wind farm employees, creating a black paper with libellous texts and threatening to dump asbestos (which indeed occurred near wind turbine locations in 2018 and 2019.)” – Trouw newspaper report about a court case against two farmers.

Dear folks,

Welcome to the final instalment of my improvised triptych about what makes successful aeolian power generation possible. I dare say, the tableau is turning into a gripping picture of details and devils! Last issue it was all about giving energy communities the rights and financial wherewithal to become full members of Grid Nation. Today, it’s about how ‘communities’ participate in the siting of new wind turbines.

Judging by the two Dutch examples above, we apparently still haven’t figured out how to do this, despite having some 30 years of experience to build on. Why is that? What you’ll learn about it today:

* In theory it’s simple: you need to notify people on time, supply adequate information, make sure that people can meaningfully contribute, and assign an independent party to manage the process.

* Why? Because only due process can guarantee acceptable outcomes.

* Legitimacy is therefore always a locally tailored product. You can’t manufacture it only through bureaucratic standards of “fairness”.

* You therefore also need a versatile toolkit of participatory and deliberative decision-making that can adapt to local circumstances.

The promise of procedural justice

In 2007, Catherine Gross devised a “framework for procedural justice”, which went on to be cited nearly a 1000 times, according to Google Scholar (1000 times is a lot for the poor huddled citation-starved masses of social scientists). She starts with a simple observation: wind energy conflicts are complicated because they’re not of a clash of (clear-cut) interests, but the interplay of criss-crossing community relations. She then visits a recently completed wind farm in New South Wales to talk to people about how they felt the decision-making process went.

Overall, people didn’t think the NSW project did great.

Many people hadn’t felt heard, they had gotten the impression there was scheming going behind closed doors, and they worried about what it was doing to the community – that is, creating winners and losers. In other words, they worried about both the process and its outcomes.

Gross suggests that the worry over what it does to the community makes the fairness of the process all the more important, “because it is more likely to lead to a fair outcome, particularly when there is no clear standard as to exactly what a fair outcome is” (p. 2734, my emphasis). That last bit is important, we’ll get back to it towards the end.

Based on their review and suggestions, Gross came up with a straightforward set of guidelines about how to do things better.  

* Timely notification and inclusion of all concerned

* Meaningful ability to participate and contribute to decision-making

* Being heard on equal footing with other participants

* Getting adequate information from impartial sources

* Led by an independent facilitator

* Receiving response to input

That… seems doable, doesn’t it? Let’s see how this compares to some real-life consultation processes.

The practice of distributive justice

Right around the same time Gross was jotting down these helpful notes, Denmark was seeing a decline in interest in, and growth in controversy over, wind development projects, after a decade or so of spectacular initial success. Commentators (such as Bauwens et al 2016, Mey and Diesendorf 2018, Roberts 2020) suggest that the change in fate followed a shift from community-driven to corporate-driven development. If so, the Danish government only treated the symptoms by stipulating standards of minimum fairness (through compensation, benefit-sharing or co-ownership).

In a recent article, Marie Leer Jorgenson and her colleagues reviewed two of these rules: one to compensate for the loss of property value, thus reducing the burden; a second to allow and require a minimum of surrounding residents to invest in the project through shares, thus sharing in the benefits. The rules defined how much compensation was available to whom and who would get (preferential) access to the shares.

In order to find out how these rules were working out for people, the researchers visited three different sites: three development initiated by one or multiple farmers, one project mostly owned by the farmers themselves, one at the behest of a Copenhagen based utility, and another sold to an external investor after set-up. Each approached participation and the execution of these mechanisms differently.

In the case of the latter two projects, focus groups and interviews suggested that most people did not think the compensation schemes were fair. They felt the burdens on those living nearest to the turbines was too big; that external investors were making profit (or cleaning their CO2 slate) over the backs of locals; that the (meagre) sums they received did not address the degradation in the quality of their environment; that buying shares as a tool disadvantages the poor. In the first case, where all the co-ownership shares were actually sold, residents were more positive, though some voiced similar objections.

Learning the wrong lessons?

Now, the Danish government created these laws because they wanted this great transition towards renewables to be fair. However, re-reading Gross and now reading Jorgenson et al, it seems like Danish lawmakers drew the wrong conclusions about how to make sure things are fair.

* Remember Gross’ main conclusions: ‘fair procedure’ is the most important of all the justice principles. However, the Danish community provisions targeted distributive justice.

* Deprioritizing fair procedures (and letting standard planning consultation practices do the work of gathering input) has two consequences.

* One, it makes it more difficult to tailor to local problems and solutions. For instance, the law stipulates a 4,5 km radius in which people can apply for shares. In some cases that may make sense, but in others it doesn’t.

* Two, and this is a closely related point, it makes it more difficult for people to feel they are heard and recognized for their specific values, hopes and fears. For instance, when people feel monetary compensation is inadequate and inappropriate for the loss of quality of life that they experience or fear. But there’s no room for that, because the bounds of discourse have already been set by the mechanism.

In that sense, the Danish compensation mechanisms are not merely insufficient, but even counterproductive.

Legitimate (accepted) wind development project needs to do justice to standards of fairness in all dimensions: in terms of outcome (distributive), participation (procedural) and recognition (for instance, of non-monetary value of the environment).

Beyond invited citizen consultation: here be unicorns

I can feel some despair creeping into the pit of your stomach. There’s too many variables! How can anyone do these justice?? Well, yes. But: there’s this slogan by the Dutch Tax Services, from the good ol’ days, when they could still claim to act in the public’s interest, “we can’t make it any more fun, but we can make it easier”. Well, I’m here to make a different promise: “we can’t make it any easier, but we can make it more exciting!”

For this promise, I’m turning to Helena Solman, PhD candidate at Wageningen University’s Environmental Policy Group (full Monty: I know Helena from the time I did my postdoc there). For an (open access) review that’s hot of the presses, she went through all the literature she could find looking for examples that offered a much wider window of opportunity to participate: different kinds of people, different stages of planning and development, and a more diverse set of questions that people got to tackle. This broader set of engagements she calls co-production.

We sat down for a Zoom session together. Here’s Helena explaining co-production:

What is often forgotten is the wind turbine technology itself. Usually, we often only discuss acceptable locations, and I think that the story can be much more nuanced in terms of how and when projects can be acceptable. Take concerns about birds and bird strikes. Should people say only yes or no to wind turbines, or could it be a conditional ‘Yes, if you improve this or that’?

So we can open up the discussion about what kind of wind turbines, how many, how tall are acceptable. And I think that there is a huge potential in making better use of digital technologies in the design phase, so, to have a better idea about how much noise they will be producing, how they will look in the landscapes, or who will have the negative impact of shadow flicker. So to make that much more tangible to people, and to try and experiment with the design, to see what is better, right? Is it a few smaller wind turbines, or one big one?

In other words: stop asking people whether they find something acceptable or not – y/n, location A or B, and sign on the dotted line – but give them responsibility in shaping the renewable landscape of the future. This is perhaps the most profound follow-up to Gross’ insight into the value of fair procedures: they are important because often we don’t know what the right outcome is.

Opening things up like that, though, is guaranteed to be messy, and requires adjustments from planners, developers, citizens and even turbine manufacturers – but it seems to me the payoff will be all the greater.

You can take advantage of Helena’s near-encyclopaedic knowledge of the topic by listening to our entire chat by clicking on the play button above, or by tuning in through your favourite podcast app. We jointly reviewed the points of this newsletter, so it’s a nice added layer. If you don’t want to listen, you can read extensive excerpts from the transcript here.

For now I bid thee adieu with our last piece of sonic fabric to tie up this triptych. It all started with the Texan corridos offshoot of mariachi, with a story about life across borders, we then had the back-to-the-roots mariachi from last week, and now, to close off somewhat in style, we’re crossing two more borders and multiple music genres: a collab from the ill-fated band Armistice – victim to the vagaries of romantic love – and Mariachi el-Bronx. Enjoy and till next time!

Marten

Sources

Gross, Catherine. 2007. "Community perspectives of wind energy in Australia: The application of a justice and community fairness framework to increase social acceptance". Energy Policy. 35 (5): 2727-2736. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2006.12.013

Solman, Helena, Mattijs Smits, van, Bas Vliet, and Simon Bush. 2021. "Co-production in the wind energy sector : A systematic literature review of public engagement beyond invited stakeholder participation". Energy Research & Social Science. 72. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629620304515

Leer Jørgensen, Marie, Helle Tegner Anker, and Jesper Lassen. 2020. "Distributive fairness and local acceptance of wind turbines: The role of compensation schemes". Energy Policy. 138. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2020.111294

Last week I teased my interview with Muzna and Neil about tackling corruption in the Lebanese electricity sector. They wrote the report about it (together with Ali Ahmad and Marc Ayoub). Last week you got the gist, but now, you can hear - or read - the whole interview! Find out more about what achieving reliable electricity meant for the people involved, about the intricacies of the political settlement and about how poor governance and poor uptake of renewable energy capacity hang together. (You can also listen to this podcast on Spotify, Apple, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts.)

Transcript

Today I’m taking you to Lebanon, to a story about how to do good in messy, murky circumstances. Here to tell the story are Muzna al-Masri and Neil McCulloch. They recently co-authored a report about a town in the Bekaa Valley, in the east of the country, a couple of stone throws away from Syria. The town is called Zahle, and it has 24-hour electricity, which is unfortunately unique in Lebanon. Responsible for the service is EDZ – short for Electricité de Zahle. They got a concession to operate in the town from the national utility, which is EDL, the Electricité de Liban. So, acronyms out of the way, if you’re curious about how they did it and what we might learn from it, welcome to the Social Life of Energy.

Neil

So the backgrounds of the research project is a research program by SOAS, the University of London, on anti-corruption evidence. And what they were interested to, to do was to try and understand why anti-corruption programs around the world have been so unsuccessful.

Neil

And their idea was that they've often failed because they have this sort of cookie cutter approach to anti-corruption, they have a common idea of the things you have to do to tackle corruption. And what they've pointed out and they've now accumulated a lot of evidence for this is that you really have to understand the nature of the underlying political settlement in order for to be able to tackle corruption in an effective way. Because countries are different. And the ways in which politics are work are different. And so they've done a whole set of studies, in particular in the electricity sector, looking at various types of reforms in Bangladesh, in Nigeria, and also our own study in Lebanon, to see how progress is possible within a different context. So our study looks at corruption in the electricity sector in Lebanon, which is infamous, as we all know, but explicitly how it was possible in the city was actually in its surroundings, to provide a reasonably good quality functional electricity service in an environment in a broader environment, which was very dysfunctional. How was that feasible in that in that political context?

Marten

Okay. Great, thanks. And Muzna can you speak a little bit more about what's going on in Lebanon, for those who don't know?

Muzna

Basically, in Lebanon electricity problem has been ongoing for many decades. There are constant electricity cuts in the city of Beirut, at a minimum would not have electricity three hours a day outside of Beirut, it's 12 to 14 hours a day. The corruption in the sector is huge. It is responsible for a large part of the national debt. And as a result there are a lot of private generators that are covering that kind of need in energy and but also causing a lot of air pollution and forcing most residents to pay huge electricity bills, both national one and kind of for private generators.

But there is one bright example, which is the EDZ the electricity of Zahle, which has managed to generate electricity 24 hour electricity, with excellent collection rates, with excellent quality of service. That is a huge contrast with the National situation. And at the same time has captured a lot of people's imagination. So how can EDZ do it? And if we can do it in one setting, can’t we all do that? We've actually been hearing this kind of question, can I do that in this refugee camp? Can we do that in Hamra? So in a way, our study answers this kind of global question on corruption, but also attempts to answer to the Lebanese people. Is it doable elsewhere?

Marten

Okay. So what is your most important finding or message that you've concluded from the research?

Neil

Um, I mean, the most important message, to my mind is the one that mostly just mentioned, which is that this is doable. But, reformers within Lebanon and reformers within of the international community have been banging their head against the brick wall of electricity reform in Lebanon for decades, exactly as Muzna says, and have mostly failed. And yet one city has managed to succeed. So the real question is, how, how is this possible? So the main message I take away from it is that if you have a really good understanding of how the local politics actually functions, it is possible to negotiate a solution, it is possible to make progress. However, what our study shows, which is a little bit uncomfortable, is that this is not a story of some heroic reformer doing all the right things against all the odds, it's a much messier, much more murky story than you might like to believe. Because EDZ has succeeded in part because of the failure of the Lebanese state. And it succeeded in part at the expense of the Lebanese state. So there's a downside to the story as well as an upside.

Muzna

Yeah, if I can continue on this, I think the main message for me is that in a country that has that amount of corruption, there is no way to come up with an arrangement that improves the quality of service for people without making concessions and sort of feeding the beast if you say, so you have to kind of pay some to the people who are responsible for the bad quality of service to start with. But then there is a way of minimizing these kinds of concessions you're making, by leveraging [political support].

Neil

And I think that's been one of the remarkable things of the story of Zahle is the way in which EDZ has managed to mobilize the community. They've funded sports clubs, they found a funded religious organizations, they've got the entire community around them campaigning and championing for them as a success. And then that is strengthening the political authority of EDZ to be able to battle the centre, which could have shut it down, which could have made what they were doing impossible, but they were so popular. And they knew that they could get people out in the streets to support them, that they allowed it to continue. So there's a very clever politicking going on there about achieving the outcome, but also exactly as Muzna said, in order to be able to come to, shall we say, compromises with those in the centre who might block it, you need to make you need it to make a profit, you need to make a surplus. And the way in which EDZ achieved that was I think, very clever. And it was the exact opposite of all of the international advice, the international advices make everything transparent. EDZ managed to make everything not transparent, and thereby managed to make a significant profit, which they could then plough back into investment into the quality of service and also into reaching settlements with the people who might oppose them.

Marten

Okay, so there was the puzzle at the start with like, how does EDZ do it? And I'm hearing two answers. One is community support. And the other one is making things less transparent. Maybe Muzna, you want to elaborate on that?

Muzna

I think the puzzle is more complex than that. I think the community support, if I may elaborate on that is not about just leveraging support. So we could like, as we did research, we kept on like discovering one layer after another of that kind of relationship. At first, I understood it as a straightforward sponsorship from EDZ to the community to get their support. But then, and we understand it, like, I understood it as clientelistic ties, and there is this kind of linkages of clientelism being negative, anti-democracy... And soon after, we realized, actually, they would support them anyway, and that sponsorship was much more complex than paying the community for EDZ to make a profit, you sort of pay the community, but they are on your side anyway. But by that payment, you can sort of collaborate with them, although you have the upper hand.

And that complex relationship is very important how EDZ operates it, in relation to the centre, to the national level political actors. So I would say it's a complex puzzle in the sense that the negotiations are in parallel with members of parliament who get maybe get a cut or profit in other ways, with a few providers who are tied to (wholeseale) national actors who have interest in continuing to sell diesel fuel. And so EDZ buys from them too. But also at the national level of employing local generator owners, so that they do not oppose the plan for generation by EDZ; getting the support of different kinds of sectarian players, so that the company is in line with the sectarian politics, and these elements together, that had EDZ negotiate a contract with the government that is to its interest, but also allows for better service.

Marten

Okay, thanks. Neil, can you maybe give an example of what you mean by making things less transparent? And maybe afterwards, we can think about implications of your findings, like what, what kind of policy advice, if you will, might one draw from this?

Neil

I'm not sure the policy advice is to make things less transparent. But just in terms of how that was done, it was very clever. So one of the fundamental problems with electricity supply across Lebanon has always been that the price that people pay for their electricity, the price per kilowatt hour is way, way below the cost of supplying that electricity. More than half of all of Lebanon's enormous debt is as a consequence of the deficit. so over the years of EDL, as a result of under paying for electricity, well, most people wouldn't say it was under paying because they received such a bad service. But it's a vicious circle, because they receive such a bad service, because no one can invest in it because they underpay. So, therefore, you've got this challenge, in order to be profitable, the price that people pay has to be more than the cost of supply. But if you were a politician, and you came along and said, ‘Hey, you know what, we're going to triple the price of electricity’, you would be booted out of office very quickly indeed. Nobody is going to do that.

But there is a willingness to pay more for electricity, people wanted a decent supply. And they particularly want electricity when they want electricity. They want to be able to switch it on and it works at any time of day. So therefore, there's a big latent demand for paying significantly more, a big willingness to pay as economists say, for paying significantly more for electricity, if it can be reliable.

What EDZ said did was they combined their bills in 2015, with those of the EDL. EDL will supply the electricity way below cost, very loss-making but that's EDL problem. And it's been purchased very cheap by EDZ. But then when the EDL electricity cuts off, as it does half of the time, maybe a third of the time. So then EDZ’s own generators would supply the electricity. But because there was one bill, you couldn't see what rate EDZ we're charging you. In fact, they were charging five to six times the rate of EDL. So while they're making that very, very tiny profit on the electricity that they're buying from EDL, they're making a huge profit of the electricity that we're selling from their own generators.

So because people could see what the underlying rate for their electricity was, but they wanted the electricity, they were willing to pay. And the overall bill size wasn't actually much bigger than they would have paid anyway, if they'd been paying a private generator. So they weren't personally harmed by this. In fact, sometimes the bills went down a little bit, sometimes they went up, it depends on people's personal circumstances. But suddenly, they were in a position where they get the electricity when they wanted the electricity. So by in a sense hiding the rates, EDZ was capable of supplying that electricity, when it wouldn't have been if it had been transparent about it. Now, the challenge going forward is, you can't hide forever. And so in terms of what you do, it would be perhaps a good idea if one has a similar sort of model to EDZ, a set of concessions at the city or regional level, which would allow generation, which would allow local concession operators to operate like this. But the price has to be regulated in order to be able to protect citizens. And whether there's a political deal to be done with citizens, that would enable people to pay a price that would allow the concessions to make sufficient money to be invested in the lines and the services that are necessary to provide a good quality service. I think that's a big open question. We don't know the answer to that.

Marten

Yeah, right. Muzna, anything that you want to add to that big question?

Muzna

Yeah, I think there are a couple of things that go in parallel but which are not about the technical questions themselves, like the discovery of how tied the feeling that I have 24 hour service, 24 hour electricity, how tied that is to a feeling of dignity, of respect. And that's a key impact. So there are the elements of ah, it's more comfortable, and it's good that I don't have the stress of thinking when should I turn on the AC and when do I turn off the washing machine, but also the feeling that I am respected as a resident in this place as a citizen. And in parallel to it is the success of EDZ that's probably unintended, but you can see it in the field, the success of EDZ, when contrasted to the failures of the state, often make people think that the state is bad, like we just want to privatize everything, whereas you have you have some successful examples in municipalities, for example, where the municipality owns the generator, regulates it, and the prices are very similar to the prices that EDZ [charged]. But the general understanding is, if EDZ succeeded, it's because it's a private company and so privatization is the solution. And I think this needs to be tackled a little bit because it's not that straightforward.

One side impact of the kind of illicit overhauling of the network and the provision of 24-hour service is the fact that they have a much higher percentage of energy generated from solar sources. So basically, they've encouraged mostly houses, farms and also several factories, to install solar PV panels that then they could buy the excess. electricity generated from that in the city. And that's that makes Zahle one of the highest cities in the country with solar power generation. So there was some potential there, maybe not exploited fully, especially because of the length of the contract and several other reasons. But that's one thing that may be is worth building on.

Neil

Can I just add a point on that? Because I'm really glad you mentioned that must know that Muzna. The challenge with renewables is that in order like all energy investments, in order to be able to recoup your investment, you have to be thinking long term. But the environment in which Zahle, and every other city in Lebanon is operating is that everything is short term in politics. So you might get a two year renegotiation, and another two year renegotiation, and now you have to do another deal, and so forth in order to negotiate your way and then navigate your way through the complex politics. And as a result, it's very difficult for them to make a long-term investment. So one of the things we've found from our study, from some of the conversations was that there was an opportunity to do significantly more renewables than they currently did. But that that couldn't be undertaken, because that would require a 20 year contract, and no one can think 20 years ahead in Lebanon. And that's a tragedy in a way. I mean, I find it ironic that we regard Zahle as a success, because they managed to put in place 64 emergency diesel generators, this is a big success. This would not be regarded as a success anywhere else in the world. These are big, dirty forms of generation. But just being able to supply reliable electricity is a huge success. But the next phase needs to be to shift over towards renewable cleaner generation, and that will require a longer term mindset and a greater stability to be able to make those sort of choices.

Marten

Okay. This sounds like a good message to send off our listeners, to think the importance of the longer term, let's say! Thank you, Muzna and Neil, for talking to me about this report.

Neil

Fantastic. Thanks, man.

Muzna

Thanks, Marten, for having us.

Dear people,

Recently I explored the idea that there might be moments particularly productive of change. A break in routines, because of a life transition (a new job, new house, new kid) or because of a societal crisis (say, a pandemic or, uhm, apocalyptic wildfires). The result of that exploration was, in a nutshell: yes, certain moments can make change possible, but not as much as you might think.

The limited reach of these transitional moments comes down in large part to the fact that a lot of the execution of what we might want to do (differently) actually depends on the wider ‘infrastructure’ of our lives: our homes, our local transportation system, the energy grid, but also our social relations: the people we live with or the requirements of our job.

If that’s the case, why not flip the question of potential change on its head? The research I discussed earlier focused on individual life transitions. What if we looked at collective life transitions? Could a community wreak greater change? Have we really plumbed the depth of what change people are capable of?

To address this question, Beatriz Pineda Revilla designed a number of interventions in three different ‘communities’ in Amsterdam, as part of her (recently defended) doctoral research: in a sustainability Facebook group, with two neighbourhood organizations, and among a group of “self-builders” of sustainable houses. She didn’t break their routines – a routine matter of research ethics – but she did try to create other ‘windows of opportunity’, as she calls it. What she wanted to do instead then, was to create fissures in discursive conventions. The key idea here is that, firstly, we might not even have the language to think about change in the first place, and secondly, that such language needs to be communally grown.

Researchers taking an interventionist approach. Visuals here from the CODALoop project that Beatriz’s research was a part of.

Let’s take a closer look (I would have said if I were on YouTube).

Note: today’s newsletter reflects my interview with Beatriz (two weeks ago, before I went on a much-postponed break from my home, which explains my longer than usual absence from your inbox). We taped the conversation, so you can also listen to it by clicking on the play button above or get it wherever you listen to podcasts. You’ll get more of Beatriz and less of me, double the value!

So, what if we did give people a language to think about sustainability and energy? Would that allow them to re-think their position? One of the ways Beatriz tested this hypothesis is through.. an energy quiz!

The participants in this particular quiz consisted of the (regular) visitors to a community neighbourhood organization that worked to strengthen social bonds among vulnerable groups, whether it’s women who provided intensive care for a loved one, and had little time and space to build their own community, people with a mental disability, or migrant women from Turkey with poor Dutch skills.

We worked with a comedian [in order to make] the topic of sustainability and energy consumption more approachable to an audience that would have never gone to a lecture on sustainability or on energy consumption. So, by organizing a setting that was entertaining, fun, and easy – a nice evening – it allowed us to bring to the surface topics that otherwise would not have been brought up. So, for example, ‘how long do you shower? Is eight minutes, the average in the Netherlands, normal for you?’ So, in the audience there were reactions like “Eight minutes? Wow, I spend at least 15!” or “Oh, no, eight minutes is quite okay. I take even less time”. You get new kinds of interactions.

New kinds of interactions.

Now, the way we talk about things betray norms to which we more or less consciously adhere.

Do we consider eating meat normal or not, because we belong to a community of vegetarians? Do we think it normal to fly to Bali every summer or do we go to the Ardennes [in neighbouring Belgium] by train?

If you can open up these norms (8 minutes?) to collective examination, by encouraging people to put into words these more or less conscious norms, you might just create some wriggle room for people to consider alternatives as well. Leaning on the work of anthropologist Richard Wilk, Beatriz calls this process cultivation.

A decent life

One important thing to remember in these collective examinations is that the answers (and confirmation from their peers) that people will look for are fundamentally about people’s evaluation of what is a good – or decent – life.

In one of the meetups the sustainable (Facebook) community, we discussed the different types of appliances that the people have at home, and which ones were more energy consuming. Then we would ask questions such as, ‘if you could choose only of two devices, which ones would you choose?’ This type of questions put the participants into a state of mind that forced them to really think more minimally, to think ‘Okay, if this is now the situation so I cannot have like 10 devices, what would be my real needs’. What do I need for a ‘good life?’, as people often put it.

And that frame – what is a good life, Beatriz suggests, is actually a quite powerful one.

I think talking of decency allows us to go to a place where there is no blame or guilt. It is more uplifting, the idea that we can also live a good life with less. So it was interesting to see how a small group of members were into, say, ‘alternative hedonism’: living with less, because it gives you pleasure. One example was this lady who was saying how she chose a smaller house to have a smaller mortgage to have more freedom to work less. She could have the extra time to do volunteering or a hobby, which made her happy.

Note that decency can also work as a language of change for those who have to live with less because of poverty (rather than lifestyle), and it would be good to try and connect these two kinds of conversations.

A decent meal.

To what end?

If this collective approach to ‘windows of opportunity’ might be more powerful than banking on individual life transitions, Beatriz is still fully aware of that teensy little problem that people’s capacity to change things up is heavily dependent on the material infrastructure and social relations of their daily life. That question still lingers: will people put their newfound awareness to practical ends? In part, she had to bracket this question, because answering it would require more time than her PhD funding could afford. In part though, she also addresses the question head-on in her recommendations for policy makers.

Her main message is to step away from the whole nudging business (if you needed any convincing holding individuals accountable was a stupid idea, read Minimum Viable Planet about how the individual carbon footprint was an invention of the fossil fuel industry) and to open up the doors to communities. Firstly, local organizations can and should be entrusted with the initial cultivation process. But then secondly, local government shouldn’t wait for people to then shift to more sustainable practices, it should step into the circle and get in on the cultivatin’!

I think it would be interesting to invest in existing communities within a neighbourhood. To create teams, I call them energy teams, that can support these communities and keep them active and to try to bring them further into this topic. So ideally, [an energy team] would be someone from the community, maybe a social worker who also that acknowledges the challenges and the different [moral] frames of the community, someone from the municipality, and maybe, why not, an artist or an anthropologist, someone with the type of knowledge and flexibility that can bring people together.

A major problem [mounts on soapbox] with how ‘participation’ tends to be organized (in countries like The Netherlands) is that it comes in way too late in any sort of decision-making process and is quite functional: ‘hey, come and make a decision about this thing we’re doing’. But people need time. If you ask them for that decision, many might say no and nobody’s happy. Better would be to engage them before in activities that might open up this cultivation process. Before they need to have an opinion, before representatives need to make a decision.

Such an approach requires not only a recognition that a successful energy transition requires a more or less unprecedented investment in technology development and deployment (a position political parties are slowly starting to openly acknowledge), but also that energy has a social life – and thus requires a proportionate investment in human resources as well – artists and anthropologists and all those who can bring people together (a minority position that you can help get adopted more widely by forwarding this email 👌).

I’ve only scratched the surface of Beatriz’s work. Listen to the podcast for more, read the thesis in particular if you’re interested in the workings of ‘moral frames’ to talk about energy (like ‘alternative hedonism’), and for her contributions to practice theory (to remedy the latter’s relative disinterest in the particularities of human agency). Get in touch with her here or here.

Best wishes for now, tips and suggestions welcome!

Marten

I’m talking with Tineke van der Schoor about what makes change possible in the energy sector. One key factor: networks. Especially networks that can span different scales. Tineke recently defended her PhD thesis Strategies for Energy Reconfigurations: Obduracy, values and scripts, happy occasion for this talk.

The podcast is in Dutch, so if you’re curious but Dutch is not going to do it for you, please check out the accompanying newsletter.

Enjoy!

Dear folks,

In the fall of 2019 (which seems disturbingly close; what happened to 2020?), I wrote about the importance of understanding people in context. Energy practices and energy values are developed in our relation to the things and people around us. Today’s podcast returns to this topic with what actually happened in 2020: SARS-CoV-2. Below you’ll find a small bullet-point summary of the main points, but before that I’d like to give you a quick preamble, extrapolating some implications of the work by Butler, Ryghaug and colleagues that I cover here.

Welcome back to SLE! Some of you may have noticed a slowed down pace of production. In order to give myself some breathing space and save myself some frustration, as of now I’d like to formalize that by starting a biweekly publication interval. At least over summer, after which I will re-evaluate. Thanks for tuning in!

* Sustainable consumption is important. It’s a major component of the entire sustainable energy package.

* However, for a host of reasons, we can’t expect citizens to consume our way out of climate catastrophe. Perhaps the most important reason: winning one heart at a time is by far the longest and most roundabout way to achieve systemic change.

* Far more direct is… changing the system! New energy infrastructure; incentives for and constraints on industry.

* Consequently, our strategy shouldn’t be to encourage and rely on people to make the best consumptive choices. ‘Sustainable consumption’ is not a meaningful policy to pursue.

* That doesn’t mean that we do not need citizens in this whole effort. We need them to chime in on how, where and when systemic changes should be made. 👉 These changes will occur in their intimate spaces, and intervene in their work flows: they have a right to be heard about this. 👉 The effort will also be better informed. If you don’t listen to stakeholders, you’re flying blind (or at least you’re flying with a navigation system full of blind spots).

* Does that mean we should give up on finding ways to encourage people to take shorter showers, if those showers will not win the war anyway? Not necessarily. The studies in the podcast show that these programmes are valuable because they produce friction. Friction can create space for reflection.

* If you then capitalize on that space for reflection by offering opportunities to chime in, the friction becomes productive and its tensions can find resolution.

Sustainable consumption can be part of a ‘climate public sphere’. More than actually moving the needle in reducing energy demand, this is its real value.

Today’s podcast

The studies suggest that new things are possible when people are taken out of their routines and taken-for-granted assumptions no longer quite hold. If this is so, then - at least in those countries where business-as-usual seemed good enough - the pandemic should be one major source of new self-reflection, right? I reviewed some of evidence for this (in Shirani et al 2017; Burnhingham & Venn 2020). Conclusions:

* Well, likely: yes. But what exactly people are reflecting on and are able to change in their routines depends a lot on the social and physical context.

* Still, given how massive this pandemic has been: everyone has experienced at least some friction over the last months.

* This, then, is a not-to-miss opportunity to engage people in debate and allow them to chime in. One way to do that: (local and national) citizen climate panels.

Hit play to learn more, or if you prefer to read, here’s the transcript.

Response to anti-racist energy policy

A little over a month ago, I wrote a post about energy policy in the spirit of Black Lives Matter. I subsequently sounded out a few subscribers who I knew were working on making sure marginalized voices were accounted for. I want to share a short piece I got back from Lillian Sol Cueva, PhD candidate at the International Institute of Social Studies, in The Hague. If you want to learn more about what she’s doing, please contact her here. If you’d like to extend this conversation in this newsletter, hit me up with a mail!

In my research about the futures of energy in municipal public markets in Mexico City, I question the techno-economic vision of energy policies in Mexico, which focuses on corporate driven technological fixes as “silver bullets” to face climate change, energy poverty and fossil fuel dependency. I ask whose visions about the future are formally included or excluded in shaping those visions, and in consequence, which and whose kind of world might be brought into being as a result of their implementation.

Early findings suggest that when visions are negotiated, the voices of the so called ‘experts’ -politicians, academics and the private sector- are privileged, while ‘ordinary people’s’ voices are erased; particularly, ideas and perspectives of racialized and low-income women, who have been historically and systematically unheard due to they/we have been considered ignorant or ‘uninterested in energy topics´.

Acknowledging that racialized women’s voices are excluded is necessary to transgress the boundaries of who should do the ‘energy talk’, but also to do something about it. I propose not just to design ‘inclusive’ measures such as counting how many women and men use energy, their race and class, but to develop new terms of engagement, tactics and ethics, in which everyday life and all social relations can be organized around alternative experiences, world-views and subjectivities.

In my research, for example, I am trying to practice what I preach by using methods that are non-conventional in energy research such as storytelling and art-based tools, informed by feminist theory, and by building my research from a participatory action research perspective. Also, I constantly pause to ask about my position in relation to the social and political context that I am studying and about the power relations that are inherent in any research process. In my research, women vendors voices are at the centre of the futures of energy in Mexico City.

Take care, till next time!

Marten

Sources

Butler, Catherine, Karen A Parkhill, and Nicholas F Pidgeon. 2016. "Energy consumption and everyday life: Choice, values and agency through a practice theoretical lens". Journal of Consumer Culture. 16 (3): 887-907. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469540514553691

Burningham, Kate, and Susan Venn. 2020. "Are lifecourse transitions opportunities for moving to more sustainable consumption?" Journal of Consumer Culture. 20 (1): 102-121. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469540517729010

Ryghaug, Marianne, Tomas Moe Skjølsvold, and Sara Heidenreich. 2018. "Creating energy citizenship through material participation". Social Studies of Science. 48 (2): 283-303. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312718770286

Shirani, Fiona, Christopher Groves, Karen Parkhill, Catherine Butler, Karen Henwood, and Nick Pidgeon. 2017. "Critical moments? Life transitions and energy biographies". Geoforum. 86: 86-92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.09.006 (Open Access)

Also read:

Protests? Check. Policies? Check. What the climate needs now is more democracy and perseverance, and Returning to pre-corona ‘normal’ is madness. We can’t let it happen, by Jelmer Mommers.