Sociotechnical typologies for national energy transitions

The energy landscape is changing dramatically. It is populated by many different and discrete energy transitions happening simultaneously in across different sectors, with dynamically different drivers, and across varying locations. This Perspective proposes a new three-part categorization to help better understand the myriad socio-technical changes being witnessed, which cut across user and market behaviour as well as institutions and technologies. We express energy transitions in three categories: Interim energy transitions, shaped by policies without necessarily public acceptance, mostly within non-democratic regimes. Deliberate energy transitions, driven by citizen-driven change without supporting policies. Transformative energy transitions stem from a combination of policy and citizen-driven change. The degree of permanence of these three transition types depends on the real and perceived benefits to energy users, sustained adoption of technology, and the regulatory regime. However, what is energy transition and why should we promote it? Energy transitions broadly refer to processes that entails changes from one form, style, state, place or scale of energy system to another (Melosi 2010, Sovacool 2016, Child and Breyer 2017). They are often accompanied by some form of energy system transformation in form, nature, appearance and character (often for the better), occurring at different scales within municipal, sub-national, national and international levels requiring multi-modal analysis at different scales (Geels and Kemp 2006, Child and Breyer 2017, Duan et al 2019). Indeed, social dimensions such as knowledge, motivation, norms, values and other contextual factors also impact the scope, speed, or scale of energy transitions (Steg et al 2015), especially transformative ones that challenge incumbent regimes (Stirling 2019, Kanger et al 2020). Energy transition often entails long term structural changes in energy systems leading to a shift in production and consumption patterns towards low-carbon energy sources (Grubler 2012, Davidsson 2014, Edomah 2019). One of the more established definitions is that energy transitions entail a change in fuels and associated technologies, such as switching from the use of fuel wood to petroleum products or changing from steam engines to internal combustion engines (Hirsh and Jones 2014, Edomah 2020). Others argue that a transition entails a shift in fuels and sources of primary energy supplies (Miller et al 2015), a change in patterns of energy use among energy users in society (O’Connor 2010, O’Connor and Cleveland 2014), or a switch in economic systems ormarkets depending on one form of energy source/technology or another (Pearson 2012). Amajor factor used in defining and ascertaining the sustainability of an energy transition is its temporality. Several related questions arise. How does the pace of change impact on energy transition dynamics? How long is optimal for different types of energy transitions? Defining or at least grappling with the timing and contextual specificity of energy transitions can be difficult (Sovacool 2016). This is because energy transition occurs in different ways and the timing and duration of transition is highly dependent on contextual norms within different energy geographies (Verbong and Geels 2007, Steg et al 2015). Stylized phases, path dependency, lock-in and subversion, which attempt to explain the way with which the principles and values of energy systems in place are contradicted and reversed, may play a vital role in defining the temporality or permanence of energy transitions. Indeed, there has been conflicting evidence with respect to the timing of energy transitions (Sovacool 2016). In challenging some misleading understanding of the concept of energy transition, York and Bells argue that it is important to be able to distinguish between energy transitions and mere energy additions (York and Bell 2019). As evidence to this claim, historical changes in energy systems that happened in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were based on an