The discussion will be streamed through Facebook live on CPR’s Facebook page
Cities in the developing and emerging countries experience many problems of electricity supply, including lack of access for all as well as irregular and load quality issues, which conventional responses such as solely extending the grid cannot fix. Therefore, collective and individual alternatives such as decentralised and hybrid systems evolve. The co-evolutions of local electricity supply systems and urban change create new modalities of supply made up of actors, technical objects, institutions, economic interests, social practices and representations. These forms of supply go beyond the traditional publicly provided services or innovative socio-technical solutions.
Various configurations of hybridisation can emerge ranging from more or less isolated (batteries, inverters, micro-networks) or interconnected solutions (smart grid systems for instance) that have operational and regulatory impacts. It then becomes important to focus future research on the under-studied mutations of these arrangements in urban and urbanising spaces and to evaluate their impact on the future of broader national electricity systems.
This invitation-only round table is organised by the Centre for Policy Research, the CERI (Centre for International Studies, Sciences Po Paris) and the Agence Française de Développement. It has a three-fold objective. First, it will present the recently launched research project Electric hybrids: emerging forms of energy transition in southern cities that will be conducted in multiple sites (Benin, Chad, Lebanon, India, Nigeria, Pakistan and South Africa). Second, it will discuss the relevance of such an approach in the Indian context and try to identify potential case studies in urban India. Finally, it will aim at explore the possibility of forging collaborations to better understand the diversity of hybrid forms of energy transitions in the Indian context and to engage a dialogue among a varied set of stakeholders.
Speakers:
- Eric Verdeil, Centre for International Studies, Sciences Po Paris
- Rémi de Bercegol, PRODIG, CNRS, Paris
- Santosh Kumar Thakur, General Manager, Street Lighting division, EESL (Energy Efficiency Services Limite)
- Gaurang Sethi, Head Business Development, Azure Power
- Ankit Bhardwaj, Centre for Policy Research
The Session will be moderated by Marie-Hélène Zérah, IRD, and Centre for Policy Research, Augustin Delisle, AFD, Delhi and Ankit Bhardwaj, Centre for Policy Research.
The agenda for the event can be accessed here.
Tea and coffee will be served at 9:00 AM, and the event will be followed by lunch.
Please RSVP for the event at federico.delorenzo@sciencespo.fr.
About the Project
The Hybridelec research is adressing the issue of the hybridisation of electrification configurations in »Southern Cities » fuelled by the emergence of off-grid devices and logics of unachieved « infrastructuralisation ». By hybridisation, we mean the coalescence – technically and politically complex – of various technical worlds of production, distribution and power consumption, of different scales, isolated or interconnected at the margin. Such processes are currently overlooked by research focusing on rural electrification and research concentrating on new technologies implemented in a few spaces in big metropolis of the developing and emerging countries.
The research aims to assess the consistency and sustainability of the emerging energy configurations observed in and at the peripheries of a large number of so-called ‘Southern cities’, particularly with regard to articulation between conventional grid and alternative solutions. These perspectives inform the analytical framework to be presented below. Anchored in a socio-technical system perspective, it is built to help accounting for and understanding the various features and heterogeneous factors that are part of an electricity supply system working in practice.