Challenges of Implementing Renewable Energy Policies at Community Scale: The Case of Strategic Energy Plans in Denmark

The implementation of national energy efficiency targets requires policies at the local scale. It is widely acknowledged that local communities play an important tole to implement these policies: as arena where renewable energy technologies can be combined with socio-economic interests of local stakeholders. Although a vast amount of demo projects are well-documented, insufficient attention has been given to the average performing municipalities and their challenges in linking technical energy scenarios with their socio-economic realities in practice. This paper analyses the Strategic Energy Plans (SEP) of 17 Danish municipalities on their development, inclusion of local communities, affected stakeholders, and on their impact on the municipalities’ working procedures.
The main technical, physical, organisational and socio-economic challenges for local energy policy implementation are illustrated by means of the SEPs. Findings indicate lacking capacity in municipalities; in both resources and technical knowledge. This explains partly the technology-focused strategies developed by private sector technocrats, leading to a negligence of socio-technical realities of the local communities, which in combination with lacking capacity makes it difficult for municipalities to implement these energy strategies. Conclusive, an implementation-oriented taxonomy of implementation challenges for communities to optimize the development and scope of SEPs is proposed. This approach might help improving local anchoring of energy strategies in communities, and raise awareness for external challenges to facilitate the strategy production and implementation process.