Energy Infrastructure Transition and Expansion: Role of Local Context, Community Collaboration, and Co-Production

Dear Colleagues,

From population growth to data center expansion, rapidly increasing urban energy demand has necessitated increased generation capacity. Sources such as nuclear small-modular reactors (SMRs) and nature-based solutions (such as hydropower wind, and wave energy projects) are garnering investments from and being explored by industry, academia, and government. However, existing capacity and resource limitations; research, development, and deployment time constraints; and societal and community conditions may create barriers to these efforts’ success. Knowledge transfer initiatives, such as those conducted by the C40 network, derive solutions from use-cases across global cities. However, these initiatives’ resilience and sustainability frameworks, when generalized, can uncover additional impediments to success related to contextual differences.

For this Special Issue, we will focus on “local” contexts, including localized designs and micro-to-mesoscale or boutique solutions that illuminate and leverage local contextual factors or sense of place within geographic and societal spaces. Studies that uncover the mobilization and realization of energy infrastructure solutions, bound by local context and community perspectives, will be considered. Especially relevant are papers incorporating mixed methodologies, including quantitative and novel qualitative approaches, or knowledge co-production (transdisciplinary) approaches in working with community members, local experts, and leaders. We expect some flexibility in the interpretations and definitions of “local context” and “community” and do not explicitly limit the scope in terms of spatial or temporal scale or particular sustainability dimensions (e.g., social, economic, technical, lived experiences, or community impacts).

Submitted articles may cover a range of topics, including, but not limited to, the following:

• Demand-side uncertainties for energy asset or systems implementation and what they mean in a local context;
• Detailed case studies of a city or neighborhood in consideration of changes in energy infrastructure, leveraging a rich set of quantitative and qualitative data sources;
• Energy system designs for localized solutions to resilience and sustainability challenges;
• Exploring the contextual nature of places and heterogeneity within and between places in terms of energy infrastructure and solutions;
• Urban planning, design, and impact assessments involving stakeholders and communities in co-production of research, development, or deployment;
• Explorations of quantitative information utilization enhancing qualitative studies (or conversely), e.g., geospatial approaches informing ethnographic approaches, for enhanced energy infrastructure expansion;
• Social–ecological–technical and coupled human–environment assessments of novel energy systems and implementations;
• Comprehensive review of how landscapes and urban areas evolve in response to energy infrastructure development;
• Local sustainability and resilience trade-offs for adding energy capacity in the digital age.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Thomaz M. Carvalhaes
Dr. Hillary K. Fishler
Dr. Bhartendu Pandey
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• transdisciplinary
• place based
• mixed-methods
• social–ecological–technical systems
• case study
• energy transition
• energy expansion
• infrastructure implementation