‘By and For Local People’: Assessing How Canadian Local Energy Plans Contribute to the Ideals of Community Energy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In contrast with large, centralized low-carbon energy projects—which are often associated with challenges such as the destruction of local environments, substantial cost overruns and negative social impacts on local people—community energy (CE) is argued to be an opportunity for communities to transition to low-carbon energy systems while benefiting the communities in which CE projects operate, rather than harming them. CE, however, is noted to be a somewhat ambiguous concept; the term is notoriously difficult to define and may be perceived differently by the various actors involved. Based on a review of international CE literature, CE is herein defined as energy initiatives—including initiatives with a variety of functions such as generation, retail, distribution and demand (Hoicka and MacArthur, 2018)—that that place a high degree of emphasis on community participation, ownership and control, and through doing so, create benefits for the community. This paper considers Canadian CE and a trend for individual communities to create their own Local Energy Plans (LEPs), as these plans are frequently placed within the umbrella of CE initiatives—both in practice and in academic literature. Through doing so, the research contributes to a gap in international literature related to assessing CE in practice, as well as Canadian literature due to Canada being an understudied country with a unique context for research in this area. This research draws its findings from a unique dataset that maps local energy plans across Canadian provinces and territories. 244 plans have been identified and 77 of those obtained in order to assess how the plans enable/contribute to the conditions for CE, as CE is herein defined. The research finds that while Canadian LEPs are locally-centred and likely entail energy-savings and environmental benefits, social benefits are not guaranteed and many plans fail to meaningfully contribute to “community energy” as it is portrayed in literature.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".