[JoPP-Public] Develop the Circular Economy and Microgrids [JoPP#15 TRANSITION: policy critique and co-development]

[Mathieu O'Neil]

2. Develop the Circular Economy and Microgrids

A circular economy aims to eliminate waste by turning goods that have reached the end of their service life into resources for other purposes, closing loops in industrial ecosystems. This implies a change in economic logic from production to sufficiency: “reuse what you can, recycle what cannot be reused, repair what is broken, remanufacture what cannot be repaired” (Stahel, 2016). The connection between a local community’s vitality and sustainability and the development of a local food economy was long assumed to be self-evident (Feenstra, 1997), yet the environmental benefits of localizing food production are unclear. Sustainable agriculture expert Gareth Edwards-Jones’s (2010) review of the evidence found no support for claims that local food is universally superior to non-local food in terms of its impact on the climate or the health of consumers, for example. This probably stems from local food production in the Global North being for the most part a restricted activity, in which consumers perceive self-produced and self-processed items as “authentic” (Autio et al., 2013). Localizing food production would thus require a complex ensemble of policy innovations, including reducing working hours, valorizing community work, and tax incentives: members of a French cooperative who co-produce open source tools with farmers point out that in France purchases of new tools are tax deductible, whereas building one’s own tools, or investments in maintaining existing tools, are not (Giotitsas, 2019) An even partial localization of food production would also mean confronting the power of the ultra-productivist agribusiness industry and its allies.

Localizing energy production and distribution involves a different set of challenges. The concept of distributed energy emphasizes small-scale generation, consumer accessibility and end-user participation (see Dafermos et al., 2015, for an overview). The building of resilient community microgrids means energy is produced in close proximity to where it is being used, instead of relying on large power plants that send electricity through the grid. Roof-top solar panels are one such example of a decentralized system. Bangladesh has pioneered both micro-finance and micro-solar initiatives, leading to a boom in so-called “swarm electrification” – the development of local nanogrids and microgrids that allow solar home-owners to sell surplus electrical power directly to other microgrid participants via peer-to-peer networks (Peters, 2018). These Global South systems and their “conscious” counterparts in the Global North, such as Brooklyn Microgrid, are currently organized as energy marketplaces for peer-to-peer electricity trading.  However nothing prevents these microgrids from being organized and shared as common goods, as advocated by Dafermos et al. (2015), once regulatory hurdles to more autonomous energy distribution have been overcome.

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