How do political and private actors reconfigure the heat network system? Insights from the French urban projects on energy transition in urban environments
Résumé
Heat networks (also known as district heating) are systems that distribute heat and sanitary hot water from a central source to consumers, via a network of underground pipes carrying hot water. Building on the concepts of system-builders and structural couplings, we investigate the systemic reconfiguration of the heat networks in France. Started in the early 2010s, the French government decided to intensify the renewable heat production to reach the national objectives of renewable energy production and consumption for 2020. This decision to produce massively renewable heat forced heat network system related actors to reconfigure these networks via integration of renewable energy vectors, e.g. biomass, geothermal heat or fatal heat recuperation. While in 2010s the development of new heat network infrastructure is mostly limited to urban projects running for the label ‘Eco quarters’, nowadays, the coupling of heat networks with urban project planning is recognised as an optimal solution to integrate production and consumption of renewable energy in various urban projects. However, the latest objectives formulated by French government in 2020 in the National low-carbon strategy (SNBC) concerning the renewable energy production, indicate national preference to encourage production of renewable electricity rather than of renewable heat. For the construction sectors, this preference concretises with recent environmental regulation (RE2020) which impacts the decisional choices of actors related to urban planning. By analysing the conception process of urban development projects in the interaction with conception and regulations impacting new projects of heat networks, we reveal the competition between sociotechnical systems of heat and electricity. We argue that the apparent national “technological” energy transition is a normative embodiment of political preferences. These purpose based political decisions are made to legitimate the political engagements and are thus based on the feasibility criterion. We 1) show the structural couplings that allows for the heat network system reconfiguration, 2) uncover the powerplay and arguments of different actors in reconfiguration-contestation dynamics, and 3) shed some light on the impacts of the reconfiguration and new stabilisation of heat networks for local authorities and final users. Our results support the idea that continuity of the socio-technical system asks for constant mobilization of resources by those that are advantaged by the present system. Second, the reconfiguration-contestation dynamics shows that certain actors are keener to disrupt the reconfiguration process of the heat network system by dismantling some established structural couplings with urban planning.