Exploring industrial community energy systems: A missing link in the industrial energy transition?

The transition to renewable energy sources affects all sectors of society, including the industrial sector. Besides climate policy ambitions and other concerns regarding the social and environmental acceptability of energy provision, the transition to renewables may also improve the availability and affordability of energy services. The latter holds especially in some developing countries, where the development of energy infrastructure often lags behind the needs of industry. For many industries, the energy transition challenge entails the future substitution of high temperature, fossil-fired processes to lower temperature e.g., electrochemical conversion routes, which will make them much more than now depend on the reliable and affordable provision of electricity. However, in many developing economies, even the current provision of electricity is far from reliable. Transitioning to power generation from renewable energy (RE) sources can contribute to a more diversified, resilient, and environmentally-friendly power generation mix.
If the energy sector in developing economies does not sufficiently invest in a robust generation mix for the future, industry itself may consider to take the lead. For individual companies, however, especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SME), the high upfront investment costs of infrastructure for harvesting and transporting renewable energy present a significant hurdle. Inspired by the literature on community energy systems (CES) and industrial symbiosis (IS), this thesis set out to investigate if, and under which conditions, industrial companies may be willing to join forces in industrial community energy systems (InCES) in order to secure their supply of electricity from renewable energy sources.