Understanding urban energy transitions: Assessing two solar energy communities in Hong Kong with the capital-based framework

Worldwide, urgency to realising ambitious net-zero targets by 2050 has heightened policy attention on urban community solar initiatives. These initiatives emerged in a great variety of forms, ranging from household rooftop solar to coinvested solar project and peer-to-peer trading market, but with varying scale of diffusion and mixed outcomes. While socio-technical energy transitions research has shed light on the diffusion of bottom-up community-driven initiatives, the up-scaling mechanisms have received limited attention and conceptualisation. This study aims to fill this gap by developing an integrated capital-based framework to conceptualise the up-scaling mechanisms of urban community-driven energy transitions, emphasising enabling and disenabling conditions. We test the application in a comparative study of two urban solar communities in Hong Kong, particularly examining how these communities responded to the new renewable feed-in tariff (FiT) policy in 2018.
Adopting a mixed-method approach, the study built a substantial qualitative dataset from 99 in-depth householder and stakeholder interviews, and engaging 57 householders in two workshops. Our analysis revealed a complex up-scaling mechanisms that involved at least 12 types of community stakeholders, seven types of community capitals, and five critical processes which include envisioning, leadership, social learning, networking, and institutionalisation. The presence of various enabling and disenabling conditions have led to mixed outcomes in solar diffusion across the two communities. While enabling conditions appeared to facilitate solar diffusion, disenabling conditions hampered the early growth and upscaling processes of community solar. Our findings have significant policy implications, highlighting the pivotal role of governments in empowering bottom-up community-based energy transitions.