Thesis supervisor
: Olivier COUTARD
The issue of energy transition is now at the top of the political agenda. The aim of this thesis is to examine the emergence of a new electricity model, determine its characteristics, and assess whether it represents an alternative to the centralized model. By combining three perspectives of analysis—institutional, technological, and territorial—it demonstrates that the centralized model has had its day. A series of changes has profoundly transformed the electricity system in terms of its materiality and organization: liberalization, distributed production, political decentralization, etc. The new configuration that is emerging is hybrid. It is the result of tensions between, on the one hand, innovations that bring about significant socio-technical changes and, on the other, mechanisms of political-administrative centralization and technical-economic concentration. The state has lost its hegemony but not its centrality, even as the sector has diversified (players, technologies) and electricity has spread throughout society (access to production, legislative process, etc.). Neither the EU's thwarted rise in competence, nor liberalization, nor the emergence of local authorities have completely undermined its ability to position itself at the center of the sector's regulation. Its action is at once selective (disengagement from operations), integrative (renewable energy, local authorities), diffuse (financing, R&D, legislation, etc.) and sometimes interventionist (shareholding, pricing, transmission and distribution networks, etc.). In a liberal context, the State is adapting through pragmatic reform of its actions and the controlled integration of alternatives. This "tamed liberalism" corresponds to a territorialization of public energy policy, within which local authorities are imposing themselves according to a logic that is both bottom-up and top-down. On the one hand, these authorities, mainly around EPCIs and regional councils, are establishing themselves as essential partners of the state in the implementation and management of a plurality of sub-national processes and technical mechanisms. On the other hand, they wish to assert themselves in this sector and have operational levers at their disposal to do so (concessions, planning, support for renewable energies, information, etc.). This appropriation remains partial and uneven today, but represents a strong trend that is making the local level the new horizon for the sector, including for the State, which is adapting its administrative organization around the regional level. A process of legal empowerment of local authorities is therefore underway, organized by the State and falling within the scope of free energy administration, which cannot be reduced to the development of energy production capacity. The new boundaries resulting from this empowerment are leading to an arrangement of institutional territories that does not fundamentally challenge the national scale and the role of the state. This hybrid configuration depends on the terms of development of production, which are subject to the technical and economic concentration mechanisms specific to the electricity network industry, its context, and the spatial and territorial logic dependent on infrastructure parameters. This is demonstrated by the counterintuitive deployment of distributed production, which takes a mixed centralized/decentralized form, resulting from the interaction between specific forms of control and socio-technical conditions (spatialization, scale logics, concentration of actors, etc.). The emerging configuration combines elements of rupture/decentralization and continuity/centralization. However, given the importance of future developments in ICT and storage, this is probably only one step in a long journey towards a new energy model.
Doctorate in Spatial Planning, Urban Planning
Year of thesis registration
: 2009
Doctoral school
: VTT – City, Transport and Territories
Thesis defense on Wednesday, October 12, 2016
Composition of the jury
:
Sabine Barles (Paris I)
Olivier Coutard (LATTS, thesis supervisor)
Gilles Debizet (Grenoble Alpes University)
Jérôme Dubois (Aix-Marseille University)
Alberto Pasanisi (EIFER)
François-Mathieu Poupeau (LATTS).