Imagining Sustainable Energy Communities: Design Narratives of Future Digital Technologies, Sites, and Participation

Title of the Paper

Imagining Sustainable Energy Communities: Design Narratives of Future Digital Technologies, Sites, and Participation

Paper Information

• Research Domain: Sustainability, digital technologies, and energy community design
• Keywords: Energy communities, design narratives, participation, sustainability, digital technologies, energy technologies, community sites, energy democracy

Research Background and Issues

• Issues and Challenges: Current research lacks clarity on how digital technologies for energy communities integrate into daily life. These studies are often led by designers, developers, and stakeholders in the energy sector, neglecting the importance of local culture and social practices. Moreover, most research focuses on technological solutions rather than the social and political potential of energy systems.
• Significance: With global attention on sustainable energy, the EU encourages collective and citizen-driven energy initiatives. Energy communities are seen as integral to the clean energy transition, with profound implications for promoting energy democracy and enhancing sustainability.
• Motivation and Related Work: Drawing from human-centered design and sustainable HCI research, this paper aims to analyze the values, participatory practices, and site-specific characteristics within energy community design narratives, exploring alternative visions for sustainable energy communities.

Proposed Solution

• Solution Proposed: The authors conduct a scoping review of ACM research on energy communities, combined with Critical Discourse Analysis, to construct design narratives for energy communities and comprehensively evaluate the assumptions and expectations embedded within them.
• Innovations:
  • Identified three key dimensions of design narratives: energy community “Sites,” “Participation,” and “Digital Technologies.”
  • Leveraged a design justice framework and humanities-based approach to uncover underlying issues and transformative possibilities in the current research domain.
• Implementation Steps:
  • Literature Collection: Filter relevant studies through the ACM Digital Library.
  • Data Extraction and Grouping: Categorize key textual fragments from the literature into design narratives.
  • Discourse Analysis: Apply Critical Discourse Analysis to assess the normative and limiting aspects of the narratives.

Research Outcomes

• Specific Findings:
  • Proposed design narratives for different types of energy community sites: based on geographic proximity, virtual communities, and national characteristics.
  • Described design narratives for community participation: local resident participation, institution- and technology-driven participation, and participation represented by others.
  • Analyzed the role of digital technologies in energy communities: as social mediators, providers of information and empowerment, and facilitators of benefits beyond individual interests.
• Advantages:
  • The study reflects the diversity in combining technological solutions with social dimensions in energy community research.
  • Discourse analysis reveals the social and political contexts that may be underexplored in current studies.
• Experimental or Evaluation Results:
  • Demonstrates that most ACM studies may fail to realize the transformative potential of energy communities, treating them as reforms or supplements to existing practices.
  • Current narratives are predominantly guided by market economy logic, focusing on energy consumption optimization and economic incentives.
• Limitations and Future Directions:
  • Limitations: The research primarily relies on ACM literature, excluding studies from social sciences and energy policy domains. The search terms used may have overlooked other relevant studies.
  • Future Directions: Proposes three pathways for future research:
    1. Reimagining digital technology visions to fundamentally question the social impacts of technological solutions.
    2. Building infrastructures that support community participation, fostering autonomous and democratic energy decision-making.
    3. Creating diverse design narratives to explore small-scale energy community practices in non-Western contexts.

Conclusion

Through a critical analysis of energy community design narratives, this paper reveals the limitations of mainstream technology-driven research and proposes several future research directions to support more sustainable and democratic energy community visions. The authors encourage academia to adopt interdisciplinary collaboration and innovative design methods to reflect and transform the current state of energy community research.