Community Energy Systems and Sustainable Energy Transitions in Ethiopia, Malawi and Mozambique (CESET)

CESET is a three-year research programme exploring how communities can support just energy transitions in East Africa. The project focuses on diversity: diversity of models of community energy and diversity of communities that engage in renewable energy projects. A key starting point for the project is that the strength of community energy lies in such diversity and adaptability. Diversity and adaptability are precisely what is needed to support the deployment of off grid energy technologies (solar, wind, hydro, biogas) in a variety of social and geographical contexts. The project involves Professor Marcus Power as Co-I and is led by Professor Vanesa Castan Broto at the University of Sheffield.

CESET explores how community energy operates at different scales, in order to understand its potential to address energy access challenges in a just and sustainable manner:

• First, it focuses on the neighbourhood scale as a means to investigate how community energy works in practice. It does so through the design and construction of a community energy project (i.e. solar mini-grid). This project will generate new learning and demonstrates the complexities of delivering energy on the ground.
• Second, CESET explores the significance of community energy within the national systems of service provision in the three countries. It does this from two perspectives: by examining the political economy of community energy in each country, and by exploring the energy landscapes within which community energy emerges in each country.
• Finally, CESET aims to understand community energy as a means to bring together a wider learning community that can support a transition to sustainable energy in East Africa. It will bring together a community of scholars into a ‘Regional Energy Learning Alliance’ which, within the project, we call RELA. We hope RELA will outlive the project as a point of reference for knowledge exchange and capacity building on sustainable energy transitions in East Africa.

Outputs can be found here

The project impact report can be found here

View webinars and short films made as part of the project here

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