Governing complementarity to enhance environmental, economic, and social benefits of renewable energy

Renewable energy is required in a transition to reduce carbon intensive energy and mitigate climate disruption. Decentralized renewable energy systems are more resilient to environmental hazards than centralized sources of power. When two or more variable renewable energy sources (VRES) are combined and asynchronous, the resulting complementarity can smooth out the combined power production. Complementarity among renewable sources can be achieved among multiple actors as producers or prosumers, as well as increasing engagement in demand side management and other flexibility measures. Complementarity is also spatially dependent, as renewable sources, and their patterns of asynchronicity vary in space, which impacts the potential actors who can harness these resources. The technical and social science literature increasingly acknowledges the importance of multi-renewable energy sources and multi-actor, and multi-end use energy systems analysis as a method of optimization. However, what is unclear in the social science literature, at multiple scales (from a regional grid to a localized grid, or a region to local community or neighborhood), is how complementarity can be encouraged or governed. In governance, this is a collective problem, whether governed by markets or by communities by hybrid democratic processes. This chapter outlines the important concepts to characterize and address how to govern complementarity among multiple actors at multiple scales of decision making.