Investing or engaging in the energy transition - Citizen financing of renewable energy projects and the possibility of critique of the good economy - HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Communication dans un congrès Année : 2023

Investing or engaging in the energy transition - Citizen financing of renewable energy projects and the possibility of critique of the good economy

Résumé

Crowdfunding platforms for RE projects and local governance are two forms of citizen financing of renewable energy projects (CIFRE). Crowdfunding platforms mainly offer loans or bond products (crowdlending), granted by individuals or legal entities to renewable energy projects. Local governance allows citizens or local territorial entities to take shares and possibly develop local RE projects. Both claim the ambition to involve citizens in the financing of the energy transition, carry visions of this involvement and of the politics that should underlay the energy transition. Each in their way, they are part of a good-economy for renewable energies (RE), in that they aim at bringing together the production of profits with that of social, environmental, territorial or political value(s). In doing so, they raise issues about the virtues of blending economic and non-economic values. In this paper, we explore these issues by conceiving CIFRE as an attempt to overcome the imperfections of a RE good-economy which enriched so-called ‘renewable’ energy (RE) resources through feed-in tariff for RE, in order to jointly pursue capitalisation on/profit from RE technologies and decarbonisation. We contend that in framing energy resources as unappropriated [yet appropriable] physical flows, this RE good-economy raised tensions because it overlooked the contribution of resources other than wind or sun (land, landscape, local social synergies) to RE development. We successively analyse the two forms of CIFRE that have emerged in France. We show that crowdlending for RE (‘investing in’) aims at marginally sharing profits with savers in order to enrol them in the good economy, tam tensions and pursue ahead with it as is, while local governance (‘engaging in’) aims at reforming the good economy by reframing energy resources as hybrid bio-socio-spatial assemblages. We show that the tension between these two forms of CIFRE is enacted in different arenas, from the earmarking of financial flows to the control over the development of RE projects. We explore the definitions of ‘goods’ that are at work, their meaning, their articulations and the way in which the critic brought forth by these strands of CIFRE, as analyzed along the lens of the notion of ‘good economy’, can inform the current French policy debate about CIFRE.

Domaines

Sociologie
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Dates et versions

halshs-04364492, version 1 (27-12-2023)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : halshs-04364492 , version 1

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Alain Nadaï, Arnaud Assié. Investing or engaging in the energy transition - Citizen financing of renewable energy projects and the possibility of critique of the good economy. workshop on valuation and critique in the good economy, Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation (Mines ParisTech) and the Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture (University of Oslo), Jan 2023, Paris, EHESS, France. ⟨halshs-04364492⟩
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Dernière date de mise à jour le 28/04/2024
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