Barriers, enablers and critical collaborations in the case of Positive Energy Districts

Positive Energy Districts (PEDs) are sometimes portrayed as a key urban energy transition solution, that may aid in meeting the need for rapid decarbonization. However, a European aim of 100 such districts by 2025, has not been achieved, and scaling has been slower than desired. The technical means to create PEDs are available, yet PEDs remain niche experiments. Our research focuses on understanding why this is the case. To this end, this paper undertakes a cross-national analysis of perceived barriers and enablers to PED impact, particularly regarding collaborative dynamics. This analysis is based on 25 semi-structured interviews with PED stakeholders across 10 European countries. This paper shows that without strategic orchestration to include missing stakeholders, PEDs and similar urban energy transition projects may struggle to evolve and achieve systemic impact. Stakeholders identify regime-level governance, regulatory, and financial mechanisms as primary hindrances. Interpreting these results through the lenses of the multi-level perspective (MLP) demonstrates how these perceptions align with documented resistance patterns in transition literature. Policy recommendations to surmount these perceived systemic voids and mitigate regime-level resistance, include mandating or incentivizing specific stakeholder participation in publicly funded urban energy transition projects. Using MLP shows that PEDs are perceived as being hindered by regime-level governance, regulatory and financial mechanisms, and contributes to the academic debate on regime-level resistance to energy transitions. Furthermore, it offers preliminary, perception-based implications for policymakers working in PED creation, development, and replication, pending further empirical validation.