Abstract

Energy communities seem to hold great promise for addressing the challenges of a just energy transition. They are expected to shift energy production to local territories, bring new actors into energy governance and intervene to reshape existing power dynamics. However, these expectations often lead to placing the responsibility for change on communities, as if they were designed to mechanically transform energy systems. This ignores the fact that energy communities navigate through domains of uncertainty where techno-managerial approaches impede the possibilities for radical change. The article suggests that adopting an infrastructural perspective can enhance and innovate the discourse on energy communities in the social sciences. Arguing that both energy infrastructures and energy communities exist in a field of tension in which three crucial infrastructural dimensions – power, territory, and knowledge – create different relational geometries, this paper proposes a new categorisation for understanding energy communities through an infrastructural lens. The aim is to identify which specific geometries of power, territory and knowledge are best positioned to build energy communities capable of challenging the current energy infrastructure. The article states that energy communities are neither conservative nor inherently revolutionary, suggesting that the transformative capacity of energy communities depends on specific infrastructural assemblages.