This article studies safety management in future gas systems. It is structured around the compatibility of its technological and institutional coordination. We identify how the current mode of safety management is not in harmony with increasingly complex technological and institutional arrangements, and combine safety science with institutional analysis to improve safety management. For our case study of biogas quality monitoring in the Netherlands, we offer structured recommendations for the reallocation of monitoring and enforcement mechanisms based on Safety-II. This article provides insights for users of gas systems and other infrastructures alike, and it offers safety scholars an approach to safety management that incorporates a novel focus on institutions.

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Cities are responsible for over 75% of the total amount of global greenhouse gas emissions. They are also home to the majority of the Earth's population. Ambitious climate mitigation goals can only be realized by transforming fossil based urban energy systems into sustainable, low-carbon ones. This is a multidisciplinary challenge that goes way beyond the technological dimension. In the Special Issue to which this Guest Editorial contributes, a multi-disciplinary perspective is used, exploring governance, institutional, ethical and other aspects, pertaining to citizen involvement in sustainable urban energy systems. The main research questions are, “How can we address key challenges to the analysis and design of sustainable urban energy systems, as regards their governance and institutions, values, social acceptance, and citizen involvement?”, and “How can this contribute to shaping a multi-disciplinary academic research agenda?” Based on the main findings from the ten contributions to the Special Issue key challenges to sustainable urban energy system design, planning, and implementation are presented, including suggestions for future research.@en

Considering that the industrial sector consumes almost one-third of the energy demand globally, it is an urgent call to reduce the carbon footprints in this sector. Among different approaches to meet this goal, such as the employment of carbon capture technologies and increasing energy efficiency within industries, transitioning to renewable electricity (RE) would be another outlook to reduce the carbon footprints and increase the energy security of the industries. Collective power generation within communities has shown to be feasible and promising in the industrial sector, where groups of industries collaborate to generate energy and meet their energy demand. In this research, we investigated how the initiation and continuation of industrial community energy systems (InCES) among companies can take place and which financial incentives the government can introduce to support these initiatives. We built an agent-based model that incorporates cost-benefit analysis and cultural factors in the decision making process of industries, to assess the feasibility of initiating/joining an InCES by industries. This study shows that the FIT mechanism had the worst performance in incentivizing the establishment of an InCES among industries. In contrast, the TAX incentive showed the best performance in mobilizing the investments towards InCES. Similarly, the TAX incentive showed relatively superior performance in electricity generation, the number of established InCESs, and the number of companies joining each InCES. Despite the better performance of the TAX incentive, it was also the most expensive option for the governments as a significant share of the establishment costs of an InCES was put on the shoulders of the governments.@en

In community energy systems, the energy demand of a group of households is met by collectively generated electricity and heat from renewable energy sources. What makes these systems unique is their collective and collaborative form of organization and their distributed energy generation. While these features are crucial to the resilience of these systems and are beneficial for the sustainable energy transition in general, they may at the same time undermine the security of energy within these systems. This paper takes a comprehensive view of the energy security of community energy systems by considering dimensions such as energy price, environment and availability, which are all impacted by decentralized and collective means of energy generation and distribution. The study analyses community energy systems' technical and institutional characteristics that influence their energy security. An agent-based modelling approach is used for the first time to study energy security, focusing on thermal energy communities given the considerable share of thermal energy applications such as heating, cooling, and hot tap water. The simulation results articulate that energy communities are capable of contributing to the energy security of individual households. Results demonstrated the substantial potential of energy communities in CO2 emissions reduction (60% on average) while being affordable in the long run. In addition, the results show the importance of project leadership (particularly regarding the municipality) concerning energy security performances. Finally, the results reveal that the amount of available subsidy and natural gas prices are relatively more effective for ensuring high energy security levels than CO2 taxes.@en

Infrastructures are complex networks dominated by tight interdependencies between technologies and institutions. These networks supply services crucial to modern societies, services that can be provided only if several critical functions are fulfilled. This book proposes a theoretical framework with a set of concepts to analyse rigorously how these critical functions require coordination within the technological dimension as well as within the institutional dimension. It also shows how fundamental the alignment between these two dimensions is. It argues that this alignment operates along different layers characterized successively by the structure, governance and transactions that connect technologies and institutions. These issues of coordination and alignment, at the core of the book, are substantiated through in-depth case studies of networks from the energy, water and wastewater, and transportation sectors.@en

This paper identifies safety concerns that arise from ongoing technical and institutional changes in the Dutch gas sector. The Netherlands has a well-developed gas infrastructure that primarily transports natural gas, although its constituting features are undergoing major changes. We identify three historical developments, and show how (1) ongoing effects of liberalization; (2) earthquakes in the Groningen-area; and (3) commitment to climate goals affect safety. Between trends of ongoing decentralization and a growing variety of gas producers, the most urgent concerns relate to the operation of low- and medium pressure distribution grids. Natural gas is losing its prominent role, leaving system operators faced with trade-offs induced by a declining share of customers. At the same time, responsibilities for new gas technologies are allocated over a growing number of actors. In illustrating how safety practices have evolved in line with incremental technological and institutional developments over the last half century, this article elaborates how sudden changes in constitutional features of infrastructural systems might jeopardize system safety.@en

The industrial sector plays a huge role in creating economic growth. While energy is vital for industries to thrive, various factors are undermining the availability of energy including phasing out of fossil fuels, CO2 emission caps and, the large gap between the fast developments of industrial clusters and the energy supply, especially in developing countries. Recently, enabled by renewable energy technologies, a transition process is taking place towards decentralized settings for energy provision where households in neighbourhoods initiate renewable electricity cooperatives. The question addressed in this research is if or to what extent the model of collective action deployed by citizen cooperatives is applicable to collaborations between industries in an industrial cluster. We identified the conditions for the establishment of Industrial Community Energy Systems (InCES) from a collective action perspective by using Ostrom's Institutional Analysis and Development Framework. The case study selected is the industrial city of Arak, one of the largest and most diversified industrial clusters in Iran. Besides desk research, data was also collected by conducting semi-structured interviews and by holding stakeholder workshops. The results of this study highlight the importance of community spirit and trust for the establishment of InCES, unlike citizen cooperatives where finance and environmental attitude are essential. A transparent legal framework to resolve conflicts that might emerge in industrial partnerships is another crucial element given the many differences among industries such as differences in energy demand and in usage patterns.

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In future urban energy systems, smart grid systems will be crucial for the integration of renewable energy. However, their deployment has moral implications, for example regarding data privacy, user autonomy, or distribution of responsibilities. ‘Energy justice’ is one of the most comprehensive frameworks to address these implications, but remains limited regarding smart grids, and regarding concrete guidelines for designers and policymakers. In this paper, we fill this gap by answering the following research question: How do design choices in smart grid projects impact energy justice? Thereby, four smart grid pilot projects are evaluated in a comparative qualitative case study research design. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews and a content analysis. Our findings contribute to the energy justice literature with insights regarding the design for distributive, recognition, and procedural justice. They underscore the importance of fairness in data governance, participatory design, user control and autonomy, technology inclusiveness, and the design for expansion and replication. Future research should explore the feasibility to govern smart grids as commons and the relationship between trust and perceptions of justice. We conclude with policy recommendations for funding future smart grid experiments and for facilitating the implementation of storage through electricity sector regulation.

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This chapter explores how responsible the innovation process was, in hindsight, in subsequent episodes of wind power development. The episodes are the American farm windmill in 1850–1880 in the USA, the direct current (DC) electricity wind turbine in 1890–1910 in Denmark, and the alternating current (AC) electricity wind turbine in 1940–1990 in the USA. The episodes turn out to be heterogeneous in two aspects: (1) they show different levels of complexity in terms of the number of stakeholders; (2) they vary significantly in terms of responsibility of the innovation process. We conclude that the Danish innovation episode is the most responsible, and the later USA episode is the least responsible. It appears more difficult to innovate responsibly when there is a high level of complexity. However, the Danish episode reveals that responsible innovation processes are also possible in a rather complex case involving many stakeholders. Furthermore, the chapter shows that responsible innovation is not just important prior to the market introduction but remains important throughout the technology life cycle.@en

This paper argues that energy systems are becoming increasingly complex, and illustrates how new types of hazards emerge from an ongoing transition towards renewable energy sources. It shows that the energy sector relies heavily on risk assessment methods that are analytic, and that systemic methods provide important additional insights.Acase study of the Dutch gas sector illustrates this by comparing the hazard and operability study (HAZOP, analytic) with the system-theoretic process analysis (STPA, systemic). The contribution is twofold. This paper illustrates how system hazards will remain underestimated by sustained use of only analytic methods, and it highlights the need to study the organization of safety in energy transitions. We conclude that appropriate risk assessment for future energy systems involves both analytic and systemic risk assessments.@en

The current transition towards low-carbon energy systems does not only involve changes in technologies but is also shaped by changes in the rules and regulations (i.e., the institutions) that govern energy systems. Institutional change can be influenced by changes in core values - normative principles such as affordability, security of supply, and sustainability. Analyzing this influence, however, has been hindered by the absence of a structured framework that highlights the role of values in institutional change processes. This paper presents an interdisciplinary framework explicating how values influence institutional change in the case of the energy transition. We build on a dynamic framework for institutional change that combines the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework with the concept of social learning. This basic analytical framework is expanded by conceptualizations of values in moral philosophy, institutional economics, and social psychology. Our framework offers researchers and policy makers an analytical tool to identify how values are embedded in infrastructure and existing regulation and how values shape communities and behavior. It explains how value controversies can trigger social learning processes that eventually can result in structural change. Thus, this framework allows analyzing institutional change over time as well as comparing change patterns across spatial and temporal contexts.

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The literature barely addresses the interrelated coordination of technical processes and economic transactions. Yet it is a prominent issue, especially for network infrastructures, which are currently undergoing fundamental technological and institutional changes. Important drivers include advances in information and communication technology (ICT) and ongoing institutional restructuring, allowing for modularization of services and competition between providers. Three areas of research are proposed. First is the identification of different interrelations between technical features of network infrastructures and corresponding rules and rights at different levels of analysis. A second issue is the relation between the performance of network infrastructures and its technical and institutional coordination. Third, research is needed on the normative assessment of different technological and institutional coordination arrangements, which will contribute to discussions of the social acceptance and acceptability of the changes in network infrastructures.@en

Smart grid technologies are considered an important enabler in the transition to more sustainable energy systems because they support the integration of rising shares of volatile renewable energy sources into electricity networks. To implement them in a large scale, broad acceptance in societies is crucial. However, a growing body of research has revealed societal concerns with these technologies. To achieve sustainable energy systems, such concerns should be taken into account in the development of smart grid technologies. In this paper, we show that many concerns are related to moral values such as privacy, justice, or trust. We explore the effect of moral values on the acceptance of smart grid technologies. The results of our systematic literature review indicate that moral values can be both driving forces and barriers for smart grid acceptance. We propose that future research striving to understand the role of moral values as factors for social acceptance can benefit from an interdisciplinary approach bridging literature in ethics of technology with technology acceptance models.

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Smart grid systems are considered as key enablers in the transition to more sustainable energy systems. However, debates reflect concerns that they affect social and moral values such as privacy and justice. The energy justice framework has been proposed as a lens to evaluate social and moral aspects of changes in energy systems. This paper seeks to investigate this proposition for smart grid systems by exploring the public debates in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Findings show that smart grids have the potential to effectively address justice issues, for example by facilitating small-scale electricity generation and transparent and reliable billing. It is a matter of debate, however, whether current smart grid designs contribute to cost and energy savings, advance a more equitable and democratic energy system, or reinforce distributive and procedural injustices. The increased use of information and communication technology raises value conflicts on privacy and cyber security, which are related to energy justice. This research contributes by conceptualizing energy justice in the context of smart grids for the first time. The energy justice framework is broadened by including values and value conflicts that pertain directly to the increased use of information and communication technology. For policy makers and designers of smart grids, the paper provides guidance for considering interconnected social and moral values in the design of policies and smart grid technologies.

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Dutch regional municipalities increasingly take an active role in the transition to more sustainable and autonomous energy supply systems, using local energy sources like wind, solar and biomass. The ambition, on the one hand, concerns how an optimal local energy supply system can be designed such that local energy targets can be realized with minimum dependence on the national energy grids. On the other hand, it is of importance to consider the coordination mechanisms between actors such as municipalities, local communities and grid operators, since they will influence the technical configuration of the system. In the literature about renewables-based regional energy systems, the technical optimizations are done mostly from a central planner point of view. Therefore, there lacks a study on the optimization models for regional renewable energy planning that has a comprehensive view on coordination mechanisms and their influence on the system performance. The objective of this work is to enhance the formulation of for self-sufficient regional energy systems by taking coordination mechanisms into account, in order to understand their influences on the system performance. In this paper, a toy model for making optimal long-term investment decisions in electricity generation and transmission will be presented. Two coordination mechanisms, namely one with a central planner, and the other one with a regional market, are considered. In addition, the different modeling approaches for rural and urban energy systems will be discussed. Initial results show that the coordination with a central planner has the least system cost. In the market-based coordination, it is recognized that the degree of shared information and of market participation influences the problem formulation. This results in the cost differences for different coordination mechanisms and for different actors, and thus gives policy implications in the choice of coordination mechanisms and in cost allocation.@en

This contribution addresses the alignment of technology and institutions in the energy infrastructure in the context of the ongoing transition towards sustainable energy systems. It illustrates the significance of technological and institutional change in this sector and the need to meet various societal norms, values, and expectations. Four critical functions are identified that need to be secured in order to safeguard the expected performance of energy infrastructures. A critical infrastructure framework is presented, indicating how to provide adequate support to these critical functions. It is argued that the different possible alignments of technological and institutional features determine the performance of an infrastructure. This should be taken explicitly into account when reforming an infrastructure. The critical infrastructure framework provides novel perspectives regarding how to approach responsible innovations in complex systems such as an energy infrastructure.@en

Energy infrastructures are increasingly perceived as complex, adaptive socio-technical systems. Their design has not kept up; it is still fragmented between an engineering and economic dimension. While economists focus on a market design that addresses potential market failures and imperfections, opportunistic behaviour, and social objectives, engineers pay attention to infrastructure assets, a robust network topology, and control system design to handle flows and eventualities. These two logics may be complementary, but may also be at odds. Moreover, it is generally unclear what design choices in one dimension imply for the other. As such, we are ill-equipped to identifying, interpreting and addressing the challenges stemming from technical innovations, e.g. the integration of renewable energy technologies, and institutional changes, e.g. liberalization or new forms of organization like cooperatives, which often have interrelated operational and market implications. In response, this paper proposes a more comprehensive design framework that bridges the engineering and economic perspectives on energy infrastructure design. To this end, it elaborates the different design perspectives and develops the means to relate design variables of both perspectives along several layers of abstraction: the form of infrastructure access of actors, the division of responsibilities among actors, and type of coordination between actors. The hope is that this way system and market design efforts can be better attuned to each other and we further our understanding and conceptualization of the interrelationship between the technical, economic and institutional dimensions of energy infrastructures. The framework also aids in overseeing the broader institutional implications of technical developments (and vice versa) and stimulates awareness of lock-ins and path-dependencies in this regard.@en

The European Academy of Wind Energy (eawe), representing universities and institutes with a significant wind energy programme in 14 countries, has discussed the long-term research challenges in wind energy. In contrast to research agendas addressing short- to medium-term research activities, this eawe document takes a longer-term perspective, addressing the scientific knowledge base that is required to develop wind energy beyond the applications of today and tomorrow. In other words, this long-term research agenda is driven by problems and curiosity, addressing basic research and fundamental knowledge in 11 research areas, ranging from physics and design to environmental and societal aspects. Because of the very nature of this initiative, this document does not intend to be permanent or complete. It shows the vision of the experts of the eawe, but other views may be possible. We sincerely hope that it will spur an even more intensive discussion worldwide within the wind energy community.@en

Energy infrastructures are increasingly perceived as complex, adaptive socio-technical systems. Their design has not kept up; it is still fragmented between an engineering and economic dimension. While economists focus on a market design that addresses potential market failures and imperfections, opportunistic behavior, and social objectives, engineers pay attention to infrastructure assets, a robust network topology, and control system design to handle flows and eventualities. These two logics may be complementary, but may also be at odds. Moreover, it is generally unclear what design choices in one dimension imply for the other. As such, we are ill-equipped to identify, interpret, and address the challenges stemming from technical innovations, e.g., the integration of renewable energy technologies, and institutional changes, e.g., liberalization or new forms of organization like cooperatives, which often have interrelated operational and market implications. In response, this paper proposes a more comprehensive design framework that bridges the engineering and economic perspectives on energy infrastructure design. To this end, it elaborates the different design perspectives and develops the means to relate design variables of both perspectives along several layers of abstraction: the form of infrastructure access of actors, the division of responsibilities among actors, and type of coordination between actors. The intention is that this way system and market design efforts can be better attuned to each other and we further our understanding and conceptualization of the interrelationship between the techno-operational and economic-institutional dimensions of energy infrastructures. The framework also aids in overseeing the broader institutional implications of technical developments (and vice versa) and stimulates awareness of lock-ins and path-dependencies in this regard.@en