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

Voor dit onderzoek is data verzameld door middel van sleuteldocumenten, interviews en enquêtes. Alle stakeholders zijn individueel geïnterviewd in november 2022 middels een semigestructureerd interview. Hierbij zijn sleuteldocumenten gebruikt om de positie van een bepaalde stakeholdersgroep inzake warmtenetten te kennen, zoals positionpapers van brancheverenigingen of beleidsdocumenten. Uit de interviews met de stakeholders zijn onzekerheden geïdentificeerd. Een samenvatting van de geïdentificeerde onzekerheden is ter verificatie aangeboden aan de geïnterviewde stakeholders. Vanuit alle geïdentificeerde onzekerheden heeft het onderzoeksteam een inschatting gemaakt welke onzekerheden van toepassing konden zijn voor een bepaalde stakeholdersgroep. Hierbij zijn de volgende stakeholdergroepen gedefinieerd: gemeente, warmtebedrijven, warmteproducent en projectontwikkelaars. Vervolgens hebben stakeholders per enquête geverifieerd of de stakeholdersgroep bloot wordt gesteld aan de voorgelegde onzekerheden. Daarbij wordt er van uitgegaan dat als, bijvoorbeeld, één projectontwikkelaar aangaf dat zij aan een onzekerheid wordt blootgesteld, die onzekerheid van toepassing is op de gehele groep van projectontwikkelaars. De primaire doelgroep voor dit whitepaper zijn gemeenten, maar ook voor andere stakeholders die betrokken zijn bij de ontwikkeling van een warmtenet zijn er zinvolle lessen te trekken.@en

Smart cities are proposed as a solution for problems of urbanization. Technologies associated with smart cities involve the monitoring of human activities and resulting data streams. These technologies affect certain public values, which may be subject to change depending on their sociotechnical development. This paper presents a method that enables decision-makers to anticipate on this pattern of value change. This method uses two axes that allow a technology to be plotted in terms of different value-laden functions: a first axis in which projects are classified that collect either personal information or impersonal information; a second axis that classifies projects as to whether they collect data for the purpose of service or surveillance. For 37 sensor-based projects in the city of Rotterdam, it has been studied how projects may shift from one quadrant to another. These shifts inform decision-makers so they are better capable of anticipating undesirable impacts of technological developments.@en

Making progress in the energy transition requires a more concrete conceptualization of the way in which the energy system works, now and in the future. This chapter presents a fairly simple conceptual framework that will help to analyze and understand the way in which communities provide themselves (more or less effectively) with the energy they need to support their social and economic activities. It provides insight into how the notion of a supply chain helps us to understand the geophysical and technical aspects of ‘harvesting’ the raw energy as found in nature and bringing it as practically usable and sustainable energy carriers to societies. Thereupon it explains how humans and societies make this supply chain actually work, turning it into a constantly evolving value chain by means of the institutional and economic coordination of the activities, driven by the values the public and private actors involved maintain.@en

Societal value co-creation is an emerging practice in renewable energy projects. Despite its increasing popularity, however, unclarities persist regarding its operationalisation. This paper provides relevant insights by explaining how expectations of societal value co-creation evolved and became performed in a co-creative energy hub project in Emmen, the Netherlands. Over the course of project development, different and sometimes conflicting expectations co-existed of the hub's societal value potential. Drawing on observations, interviews, and document analysis, we describe the developers' efforts to synthesize these different value expectations into a coherent co-creation approach. The results indicate that timing in and of expectations, actor positions and organisational design are influential in how expectations become operationalised in renewable energy projects. Recommendations are provided for the design of societal value co-creation processes in future renewable energy projects.@en

This paper describes the decision-making process regarding the siting of a high voltage transmission line in the southern part of the Netherlands by TenneT, the Transmission System Operator responsible for the electricity infrastructure. TenneT started this siting process by deploying conventional decision-making procedures, which have the tendency centrally to pre-scope, and select the technical, spatial and societal characteristics of such projects. Following the resistance of activist groups and local authorities, a new siting process was set up based on community engagement (CE) and the upfront involvement of local stakeholders, so to include new frames and perspectives and by reconsidering the workings of standard procedures. With that, TenneT opened up decision-making processes. In our paper, we will identify the practical and institutional tensions and challenges that emerged from these attempts to ‘open up’. The work is based on an ‘inside out’ description of the case: one of the researchers undertook an ethnographic study of the siting process, while the employees of TenneT directly involved in the siting process have been invited as co-authors, so to add details and the reflections of practitioners.@en

While the traditional perspective on regional power pools is that of regional electricity markets, regional power pools in Africa are development tools with unrepresentative and under-researched dynamics in their evolution and market design. Five African power pools are under development to bring the continent into a single electricity market. This paper analyses the evolution of African power pools by examining their design factors and dynamics. It compares the three most advanced power pools (SAPP, WAPP and EAPP) to identify barriers, forces, and development approaches. The paper devises a multilayer analytical framework to organise the various elements in the institutional context of African power pools and structure the analysis of the physical, economic, institutional and political factors. The analysis shows that the unequal distribution of natural energy endowments across the regions stimulated the historical development of interconnections and trade between countries. The characteristics of regional integration were vital in shaping the power pool's institutions and development approaches. We have identified three motors of change that have driven the development; regional economic communities, members’ strategies, and international institutions. It is crucial for progress that the pool staff can mitigate non-cooperative strategies, address members’ concerns, and incentivise a shift in national agendas to build confidence in regional trade.@en

In this paper, we take inspiration from original institutional economics (OIE) as an approach to study value change within the highly complex assembly of sociotechnical transformations that make up the energy transition. OIE is examined here as a suitable perspective, as it combines Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy and a methodological interactionist perspective on value change, behavior and institutions, with technology figuring as a transformational factor. This combination overcomes conceptual and methodological shortcomings of alternative accounts of values. We will present the contours of an OIE based conceptual framework connecting nature, humans, technology, the economic process, society, culture and institutions and habits, valuation and behavior. We illustrate how to use this framework to examine and understand how environmental, ecologic, safety, economic, and social concerns about the energy transition are (re)framed as (new) values in the belief systems and habits of individuals and groups. Moreover, we will explore how that may give rise to collective action, via the institutionalization of such revised values in the procedures, arrangements, norms and incentives guiding transactions. As such, this approach allows us in a fine-grained manner to conceptually and theoretically understand the way in which values change in the energy-transition, as a complex interaction of technology development and social relations.@en

De verduurzaming van de warmtevraag in de RES-regio Rotterdam Den Haag kent unieke uitdagingen. De regio heeft een grote warmtevraag door haar hoog stedelijk karakter en de vele aanwezige glastuinders. Tegelijkertijd heeft de regio beschikking over meerdere alternatieve warmtebronnen – waaronder restwarmte uit het Rotterdamse Havencomplex, geothermie, warmte-koudeopslag, aquathermie en zonthermie – die over tijd de inzet van aardgas voor de opwekking van warmte kunnen vervangen. De gefaseerde ontwikkeling van deze bronnen en de afstemming van het aanbod op de toenemende vraag voor warmte vindt plaats op verschillende schaalniveaus. Lokaal zijn gemeenten bezig hun mogelijkheden in kaart te brengen in de Transitievisies Warmte en regionaal wordt er binnen de RES-Rotterdam Den Haag gewerkt aan de ontwikkeling van een gemeentegrens-overschrijdende Regionale Structuur Warmte [RSW]. Momenteel is er binnen de regio weliswaar globaal zicht op de verschillende technologische, economische en institutionele keuzemogelijkheden. Maar er is er geen duidelijk en eenduidig zicht op welke manier deze keuzes doorwerken op de borging van de centraal gestelde publieke waarden. De TU Delft is in juni 2021 gevraagd om een drietal onderscheidende kwalitatieve sturingsmodellen voor de transitie van de warmtevoorziening. Het doel van de sturingsmodellen is het faciliteren van het 1 In de RES 1.0 is opgenomen dat de regio werkt aan een betaalbare, betrouwbare, veilige en schone energievoorziening voor iedereen in 2050. gesprek tussen bestuurders (portefeuillehouders Energie van de regionale lokale overheden), en ook tussen deze bestuurders en andere betrokken partijen bij de RES. De sturingsmodellen zijn tot stand gekomen op basis van drie onderzoeksfasen. In de eerste fase zijn o.a. interviews gehouden met RES-partners en belangrijke betrokkenen. Het resultaat van de eerste fase is een overzicht van gezamenlijke warmte-opgaven in de RES regio Rotterdam-Den Haag, die een gemeentegrensoverschrijdende aanpak rechtvaardigen (Zie hoofdstuk 1). In de tweede fase hebben we de aard van het huidige bestuurlijke en maatschappelijke besluitvormingsproces geanalyseerd en gekarakteriseerd als een probleem van collectieve actie: een situatie, waarin partijen individueel rationele keuzes maken die leiden tot collectief irrationele en minder optimale uitkomsten (hoofdstuk 2). De uitkomsten van die analyse zijn getoetst op hun herkenbaarheid in verschillende bijeenkomsten met RES-ambtenaren, bestuurders en betrokken bedrijven. Ook zijn daar de aanpak en de schetsmatige contouren van drie door ons gesuggereerde sturingsmodellen besproken. De ontvangen commentaren, suggesties, en verbeterpunten zijn meegenomen in de derde fase van het onderzoek, waarin de sturingsmodellen verder zijn uitgewerkt en verdiept. Deze exercitie heeft uiteindelijk geleidt tot drie verhalen ofwel ‘cartoons’ van de sturingsmodellen. Daarnaast zijn ook rechtvaardigheid en vertrouwen benoemd. Het eerste sturingsmodel, “Ieder voor zich in de warmtewedloop” gaat uit van een toekomst waarin het collectieve actieprobleem niet structureel geadresseerd wordt. Samenwerking is lastig doordat individuele partijen grote risico’s moeten accepteren, terwijl zij daar toch van afhankelijk zijn en onvoldoende overtuigd zijn van de voortdurende inzet en commitment van andere partijen. Ook hebben zij onvolledig zicht op de concrete voordelen die regionale samenwerking hen brengen. Er ontstaat een ‘ieder voor zich’ situatie, waarin partijen vooral bezig zijn met het minimaliseren van de eigen risico’s. Uiteindelijk worden de gezamenlijke opgaven niet volledig behaald, waardoor belangrijke publieke waarden niet geborgd kunnen worden. In het tweede sturingsmodel, “We volgen ons plan! Sturen op zekerheid en systeemoptimalisatie” wordt de assumptie gemaakt, dat samenwerking mogelijk zal zijn wanneer partijen voldoende vertrouwen in elkaar én het transitieproces hebben. Het gebrek aan vertrouwen wordt geadresseerd door het verschaffen van zekerheid, en wel door het opstellen van duidelijke formele instituties: vastgelegde doelen, normen, standaarden, gedragsregels, en procedures, vastgelegd in een zogezegd Masterplan, waaraan iedereen zich dient te houden. Zolang het Masterplan gevolgd wordt, kunnen de gezamenlijke opgaven behaald worden. Om naleving te garanderen is er een centrale entiteit nodig die toeziet, controleert, en waar nodig corrigeert. Het Masterplan is noodzakelijkerwijs gebaseerd op huidige inzichten, verwachtingen en waardenpatronen van actoren. Er wordt gestreefd naar een hoge mate van uniformiteit, homogeniteit en standaardisering in de vertaling en borging van publieke waarden zoals betaalbaarheid, duurzaamheid, betrouwbaarheid en rechtvaardigheid. Er is slechts beperkte ruimte voor anticipatie en reactie op nieuwe ontwikkelingen en veranderende maatschappelijke waarden. In het derde sturingsmodel, “Samen ontwikkelen in een dynamische warmtetransitie”, wordt de assumptie gemaakt, dat vertrouwen incrementeel groeit naarmate partijen meer met elkaar samenwerken. Een tweede assumptie in dit sturingsmodel is dat de transitie gekenmerkt wordt door maatschappelijke, politieke, technologische en economische veranderlijkheid – en in plaats van deze te willen controleren, wordt zoveel mogelijk ingezet op wendbaarheid van besluitvorming én weerbaarheid van het warmtesysteem. Het sleutelwoord in dit sturingsmodel is daarom adaptatievermogen. Er worden als eerste een gezamenlijk leer en ontwikkeltraject opgezet met zoveel mogelijk verschillende stakeholders, die tot doel heeft meer kennis over elkaar én over de transitieopgaves te vergaren. Er is ruimte voor experimenteren met technologie en infrastructuur alsook met verschillende vormen van samenwerking en rolverdelingen. In plaats van einddoelen worden tussendoelen en indicatie ontwikkelingspaden gevolgd, die over tijd kunnen en zullen wijzigen. In dit derde sturingsmodel wordt de normatieve diversiteit omarmt en gezien als belangrijke input in het technologische en infrastructurele ontwerpproces en het beheer van systemen. Er is dientengevolge een grote mate van gevoeligheid voor nieuw opkomende maatschappelijke iv wensen en waarden. Er vindt continu deliberatie plaats, inclusief met inwoners, waarin waarden actief bevraagd en onderzocht worden, en waarbij de consequenties van bepaalde waardenconflicten of schendingen van kernwaarden voor verschillende partijen geëxpliciteerd worden. Deliberatie leidt tot tijdelijke consensus. Dat wil zeggen: partijen stemmen tijdelijk in met een bepaalde definiëring, operationalisering en prioritering van waarden zoals betaalbaarheid, betrouwbaarheid, duurzaamheid en rechtvaardigheid, met het begrip dat deze waarde in de loop der tijd wellicht een andere invulling vereist. Deze drie sturingsmodellen beschrijven uitersten. Zij zijn geen voorspellende modellen in de zin dat zij waarschijnlijke toekomstbeelden schetsen. In plaats daarvan vergroten ze de implicaties van keuzes voor sturingsvormen uit voor de manier waarop publieke waarden geborgd kunnen worden en hoe infrastructuurontwikkeling en technologische innovatie plaats kan vinden. Het doel van de modellen is daarmee het faciliteren van een bestuurlijke gesprek over de organisatie van de warmtevoorziening in de regio. Wij zijn ons ervan bewust dat er in de realiteit altijd sprake zal zijn van een vermenging van de drie sturingsmodellen. Juist daarom is het van belang om te discussiëren op welk niveau, en met welke instrumenten, verschillende activiteiten en systeemcomponenten zodanig kunnen worden gerealiseerd dat geprioriteerde publieke waarden geborgd worden. De gevolgde aanpak geeft ook de mogelijkheid om te bespreken wat er in de tijd zou kunnen gebeuren, als de ontwikkeling van het systeem ‘verschuift’ van het ene naar het andere sturingsmodel.@en

This paper presents an anticipatory approach to energy justice by focusing on the nascent justice and inclusion implications of imagined publics in vision documents for the hydrogen transition in the Netherlands. Based on the results of an interpretive qualitative content analysis of twenty-one vision documents, we develop the thesis that publics, in their various roles and compositions and with their diverse demands, are not always acknowledged nor correctly represented in the hydrogen transition. Non-recognition and misrecognition of publics in these pre-policy documents is problematic and unjust and can result in additional distributive and procedural justice issues once imagined publics become performed in and by policy implementation, technology, and infrastructure. Recommendations for a more just and inclusive hydrogen transition are provided. @en

In Energy Social Science (ESS), the concept of imagined publics is used to describe how energy actors perceive societal groups around new energy technologies and projects. Findings indicate that imagined publics often build upon deficit assumptions; people are (unjustly) considered unknowledgeable, incapable, unwilling and irresponsible agents in governance. While insightful, deficit-based explanations insufficiently capture the broad diversity of publics imagined around energy system change. In this paper, we share the results of a Q-study, designed to systematically identify diverse imagined publics in the Dutch heat transition. We found five imaginaries: 1. “Meaningful participation in a diverse society” 2. “Strong and enthusiastic communities in the lead” 3. “NIMBYs, social contestation and the threat to decarbonisation” 4. “Collectivism & vulnerable groups at risk” 5. “Unburdening individual user-consumers in the transition”. Each imaginary builds upon a different set of epistemic, action and normative assumptions, which construct public agency and responsibility in transitions in distinctive ways. We explore how these constructions come to justify roles and obligations for publics as well of other actors in the heat transition. One of our main contributions is that we explicitly move beyond the analysis of singular imaginaries as we consider imaginaries to be interactive, holistic, and contextual. In comparison, key social, ethical, and political tensions and trade-offs in the heat transition become visible.

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The North Sea Consultation was set up to resolve conflicting claims for space in the North Sea. In 2020, this consultation process resulted in the North Sea Agreement, which was supported by the Dutch Parliament and cabinet as a long-term policy; however, the fishing sector felt excluded, left the consultation process, and does not support the agreement. Using semi-constructed interviews and the method of wide reflective equilibrium, this research found that in this conflict the metaphor of ‘health’ has played a decisive role. While all stakeholders want to keep the sea ‘healthy’, they disagree on what a healthy sea actually means, leading to contrastive positions on the desirability of trawler fishing, wind parks, and conservation areas—the North Sea Agreement’s main foci of interest. To prevent the unproductive escalation of such a conflict, it is inevitable to acknowledge the moral connotations of such metaphors, as this allows a decision-making process that can be considered more just. @en

Energy initiatives often lead to public contestation, even when all actors support the same underlying values. The reason for contestation can be found in different interpretations of these values. This causes a serious problem in the operationalisation of responsible innovation as this presumes a singular understanding of the values that underlie a new technology. This chapter analyses this interpretive flexibility of values in the Dutch shale gas debate. It concludes that the interpretative flexibility of values pertains to the spatial orientation of the stakeholders originating from the place attachment of different actors. Arguments presented in favour of or against shale gas exploration are connected to the expected effects of this exploration on local/regional spatiality or on the (inter)national spatiality. Arguments that are put forward in either of these frames of reference hardly connect to the other frames of reference. Due to the differences in spatiality of the arguments, a common reference point is lacking, which leads to confusion and miscommunication. This paper concludes that responsible innovation should acknowledge public values in all frames of reference in a symmetrical way. It is also essential to identify a common spatiality on which the discussion can fruitfully take place.@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

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

Energy controversies have been widely studied. Such studies are, however, generally based on either single case studies, providing rich and in-depth understanding of (local) dynamics of planning and implementation processes, or they focus on understanding responses to a specific technology (not bound to a location). Therefore these studies tend to overlook a key dynamic in controversy, namely that publics respond to projects by drawing on earlier experiences with a similar technology elsewhere, or with earlier experiences with other technologies in their vicinity. We refer to this dynamic as controversy spillover. The notion of controversy spillover helps to understand how the discursive space of controversy changes over time. In case studies, other controversies are usually considered as context, i.e. as an external condition. However, in order to understand the temporal dynamics of public engagement with energy projects, spillover from other controversies deserves to be investigated more as an object of interest, rather than as an external condition. The aim of this paper is to conceptualize controversy spillover as an important dynamic in controversies and to develop a research agenda. We identify three different types of spillover: 1) geographical (i.e. between the same energy technology in different locations), 2) historical (i.e. with respect to earlier experiences at the same location), 3) technology (i.e. between different technologies). Three empirical examples serve to illustrate the three types of spillover. We finalize the paper with a research agenda for further conceptualization and empirical analysis of the notion of controversy spillover.

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In the earliest days of the Dutch gas sector, from 1950 to 1973, the government and the gas industry negotiated the natural gas regime without much involvement of society, in a similar way to Norway. As this chapter explains, policy-making was confined to the country’s elite, representing the various ‘pillars’ of Dutch society: Protestants, Catholics, liberals and socialists. Between 1973 and 1995, when these pillars started to crumble, civil society took a more active stance on gas exploitation and commercialization. However, because of the public-private institutional setup that had already been established, there was little actual impact on gas policy. From 1995 to 2010, gas policy was characterized by liberalization, with gas becoming a commodity rather than a public good. During this period, a multitude of actors began to voice their opinions about many aspects of energy and gas supply, including economics, climate change, safety, geopolitics and local environmental protection, often in opposition to each other. This created a situation, particularly after 2012, in which policy-making has become increasingly complex. On the one hand, the role of national policy has been reduced by liberalization and by the increasing dominance of EU regulation. On the other hand, public opinion is divided on many energy issues and often seems disconnected from the complexities of managing a real-world energy system.

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Societal controversies on the implementation of new energy technologies relate to public values that are affected by these new technologies. The process of specifying and articulating these values and assessing technologies based on those values follows both a formal and an informal trajectory. This chapter studies the interplay between such formal and informal assessment in the case of two plans for the implementation of energy technologies in the Netherlands, the project to develop carbon capture and storage in the municipality of Barendrecht and the project to have explorative drilling for shale gas in the municipality of Boxtel. What these studies reveal is that values that are specified by actors emerge from different discourses. These discourses do not emerge independently, but develop in mutual interaction, at times contributing to a progressive entrenchment of positions. To avoid such a situation, the symmetry between different claims for the public interest needs to be attended by policy makers.@en