Community-based solar projects: sun-sharing politics and collective resource construction trials

In many respects, France's solar photovoltaic policy jump-started the development of what could be called "individual" photovoltaic projects: one project, one roof, one owner. Given this policy framing, projects that pursue an alternative approach to solar development (more-than-individual investment strategies) have to channel their assembling in different ways. This paper investigates community-based solar experiments - the "centrales villageoises" in south-eastern France's Rhone-Alpes region. This approach is innovative as it consists in assembling multiple panels on multiple roofs with mixed (public and private) owners. The analysis follows these emerging collective solar projects as a matter of binding together a large set of heterogeneous materialities, such as panels, roofs, buildings, electricity grid network and landscapes, and providing them with a shared status. We argue that the solar resource is defined along with these emerging socio-technical systems. Thus, its appreciation as a "common good" (or lack of such) relies on methods, tools and capacities that allow protagonists to have flexibility in forming material entanglements endowed with a collective dimension - sharing roofs, investments, risks and gains. Finally, the analysis shows that a fair solar energy project is one that not only fairly redistributes the benefits but also, in the long run, preserves the possibility of having collective discussions on diverse dimensions, especially the integration of social and landscape-related issues (landscape of justice) within the solar energy's development agenda.