Energy democracy and the co-evolution of social and technological systems
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As integrated sociotechnical systems, renewable energy systems co-evolve with new social arrangements, as social institutions of the fossil-fuel era are transformed for an age of renewables. This research explores this proposition by examining the recent phenomenon of energy democracy in three ways: 1) by drawing out and critically engaging with the implicit theory underlying energy democracy 2) by assessing the ways energy democracy has or has not enabled policy changes, and 3) by examining energy democracy initiatives in practice to understand how renewable energy is currently put to work for social transformation.Decentralized energy systems such as those based on renewables offer greater flexibility and more readily organize and enable distributed political and economic power, and vice versa, a relationship described as distributed energy-politics. The research proceeds to identify a set of three goals and 26 intended outcomes for energy democracy and presents a descriptive summary of 22 policy instruments associated with an energy democracy agenda. An assessment of congruence among outcomes and instruments finds more attention given to reclaiming the energy sector and less to resisting dominant energy regimes. The final analysis finds a set of nine initiatives for energy democracy presently operating in eastern Canada and the northeastern United States. The research synthesizes a shared transition narrative among these initiatives, converging around commitments to high levels of renewables, public and local control over energy systems, and broad social change through energy transition. Three distinct types of energy democracy and their associated narratives are proposed as "local and regional communities," "public partnerships," and "social movements," reflecting differences related to problem framings, form and specificity of solutions, critical or oppositional stance, historical positioning, and scale, agency and mode of social organization. Together this research demonstrates that renewable energy systems can, and already do, work to change a fossil-fuel society, yet a transformative energy future requires ongoing sociopolitical mobilizations across multiple levels of change. This work implies that if greater technological change is desired, more attention needs to be given to the selection and stabilization of the corresponding institutions necessary for societies powered by renewable energy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".