Electric Hybrids: emerging forms of energy transition in southern cities – HYBRIDELEC

Cities in the developing and emerging countries experience many problems of electricity supply, which conventional responses such as extending the grid cannot fix. Therefore, collective and individual alternatives such as decentralized and hybrid systems evolve. Applying the concept of hybridization to socio-technical studies, the research proposes to study these emerging alternatives for electricity supply and to evaluate their impact on the future of the electricity system, assuming they represent an emerging but unstudied form of energy transition. The 4-year research will empirically study these emerging configurations by surveying the actors and the technologies of the market, the geographical, urban and social conditions that make them possible and the regulation practices, specifically with regard to the interplay of alternative and conventional socio-technical solutions. They will reflect on the way this enrich the usual understandings of the energy transition at a global level. The team comprises 13 junior and senior researchers, who will do fieldwork in 7 countries in Africa and Asia.