Distributing power: Community energy movements claiming the grid in Berlin and Hamburg

Community energy projects, predominantly engaged in energy generation, are increasingly seeking access to infrastructures of energy distribution, especially in the electricity and heat sectors. Drawing on case studies conducted in Berlin and Hamburg between 2009 and 2016, this paper argues that community engagement in the power grid has wider implications for contested structures of decision-making on networked infrastructures in an urban context. Community actors use traditional instruments of democratic decision-making or establish new structures to access and re-shape processes of energy decision-making previously closed to citizens. Situational Analysis provides a theory-methods bundle to visualize these newly created arenas of negotiation and to understand processes of redistributing power of negotiation and decision-making between actors of the energy system.