Séminaire Villes et énergies en Europe

A regional cross-border approach to the energy transition:

Insights from the RES-TMO project with a focus on renewable energy potentials

It has been found that high quality renewable energy sources (RES) in combination with increased energy efficiency, storage, sector coupling, demand side management and digitalisation can provide good prospects for a low carbon supply of electricity, heat, and fuels for households, transport, and industry. While most studies focus on the EU or national levels, policies are ultimately implemented at regional and local levels. The RES-TMO Interreg project investigates the technical potentials for renewable energy generation in the Upper Rhine region (URR), the opportunities and challenges for the use of these potentials and the necessary energy storage capacities. At the same time, it examines the economic, legal and socio-cultural framework conditions for a resilient and low-emission energy system for the region. This presentation provides insights into the preliminary findings from the RES-TMO project with a focus on the RES potentials. Our results indicate that the generation potentials from Agro- and Ground Mounted (GM)-PV in the region reaches about 968 TWh. Agro-PV alone constitutes the bulk of this potential with 762.3 TWh owing to the regions’ high share of agricultural area. The total usable area for Agro- and GM-PV makes up about 33% of the URR total area and of this area about three quarters is designated for Agro-PV. The second largest potential in the region is wind. For wind, the total usable area is about 15.5% of the total URR area. Solar rooftop potential is also significant. According to Fraunhofer ISE, PV and wind power are considered as pillars of the future energy supply. They also constitute the bulk of this region’s potential.

Barbara Koch is a Professor of Remote Sensing and Landscape Information Systems at the University of Freiburg, Germany. She is currently head of the Upper Rhine Cluster for Sustainability Research (URCforSR) engaging the universities of Eucor–The European Campus.

Ines Gavrilut is a researcher and project manager at the Chair of Remote Sensing and Landscape Information Systems of the University of Freiburg in Germany.

 Philippe Hamman

Landscape, citizen mobilization and social acceptability issues around wind energy projects:

a Franco-German perspective

Philippe Hamman is a Professor of Sociology at the Institute for Urbanism and Regional Development within the Faculty of Social Sciences, and a member of the research unit “Societies, Actors and Government in Europe” (SAGE, UMR CNRS 7363), University of Strasbourg, France.

Local Intermediaries in Energy Transitions

Cities are a major context for the consumption of resources, centers for innovation, and a privileged level for experimentation and implementation of new approaches to problem solving. They are thus important starting points for sustainability transitions. These transitions are only in part technical ones, but essentially embedded in, based on, and consisting of changes in social practices and in the organisation of societal problem solving. Following the definition by Zapf (1989), these can be social innovations, e.g. new ways of societal problem solving that are worth imitating and of being institutionalised. Based on case studies (with qualitative interviews) in German cities and on literature, the presentation analyses local energy strategies focusing on the role of social innovations. These can concern practices in energy usages but also in the organization and financing of energy transitions (e.g. building renovations and renewable/decentralised energy production). It e.g. demonstrates a central form of organisational change in local energy transition strategies: the creation of local intermediaries, defined by their function and position in between other actors.

Pia Laborgne is a sociologist and researcher since 2004 at EIFER and since 2021 at KIT–Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis (ITAS), Germany.

Marius Albiez & Volker Stelzer