Social organisational capabilities for decentralised, renewable and interactive energy systems

Project details

Full project title: Social organisational capabilities for decentralised, renewable and interactive energy systems 

Duration: 2025-present 

UWE Bristol project team:

• Dr Maurizio Sibilla, Associate Professor
• Dr Ghada Karaki, Lecturer
• Dr Muhammad Arslan, Research Fellow

Project summary

Our research aims to accelerate community energy (CE) as a feasible, reliable and just means of facilitating a low-carbon society. CE is a social, technological and economic arrangement for managing decentralised renewable energy generation. It is typically installed and led by local communities rather than large energy providers. While pockets of CE success stories exist, the society at large still needs to adapt to utilising decentralised, localised energy production, associated storage technologies in order to exploit the local economic benefits that opportunities novel ownership models would offer.

Alongside this need for adaptation, regulatory and policy blocks mean that communities cannot proceed with local ambitions to decarbonise due to the prevalence and power of large commercial energy players and the lack of policy support for community energy.

Furthermore, prior studies confirmed that lack of organisational capacity is still the most common reason for incomplete projects. CE-BESI will focus on building this capacity. It will use a co-production approach to develop a digital hub to facilitate access to socio-technical data and knowledge, drawn from diverse communities, with a particular focus on existing understandings of innovative energy technologies which will facilitate self-organised CE in the medium-to-long term.