Let us get our hands on our future! Self-production and energy-sharing practices in Eastern Sicily (Italy)

Abstract (English)

The energy transition process has territorial declinations concerning territories' resources and development policies. This proposal is framed into a research project called Energy Commons that focuses on the relationships and contradictions between exploiting renewable sources and practices of self-production and energy sharing.
Energy is a conceptual key to analysing political, social and economic arrangements of specific energy regimes. The challenges of climate change highlight not only the role of renewable energy sources but also a different way of considering energy, no longer as a commodity but as a common good to be shared. Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) express the possibility of producing and sharing electricity by enhancing autonomy from the central distribution system and the free energy market, favouring renewable energy sources. This proposal aims to investigate the practices of energy communities in the context of eastern Sicily, in the specific area known as the Simeto Valley, a context characterised by forms of land abandonment, climate change issues and speculative processes for the construction of large photovoltaic, wind and incineration plants. The investigation focuses on the relations and contradictions between policies for the exploitation of renewable sources and forms of aggregation and organisation linked to self-consumption, self-production and energy sharing. From this perspective, the ethnographic investigation intends to analyse how energy communities' organisational and productive model promotes territorial development and growth. Analysing the discourses and practices of the actors active in the REC has made it possible to highlight two interconnected aspects that express interpretations of energy resources and the development prospects of the territory as a community. Energy production and sharing offer a territorial alternative for actors to be progressively autonomous from the centralised supply model and the economic exploitation of private companies. Despite being interpreted as the eternal unknown, energy becomes a tool to build opportunities for shared growth of the territory: an alternative way of pooling interests compared to the extractive and speculative models of the energy market.