Alessandro Sciullo

Università degli Studi di Torino | UNITO · Dipartimento di Culture, Politica e Società

The current growth-oriented and fossil-based energy system is undergoing a transformation toward renewable energy. However, simply swapping out technologies without addressing the deeper socio-economic structures risks perpetuating the actual social inequalities and environmental degradation. To counter this threat, it’s imperative to (re)politiciz...

Historically, significant energy transitions have coincided with turning points in human history, such as shifts from human to animal energy, from animal and biomass to fossil and nuclear energy, and more recently, from fossil to renewable energy due to the climate and ecological crisis. These transitions have led in the past to profound societal t...

Energy system transitions are complex socio-technical processes involving changes not only to energy technologies but also to the broader social and economic aspects of energy production and consumption. These energy transitions could negatively affect the people that they claim to serve, exacerbating current vulnerabilities and creating new ones....

Like a virus making a species jump, the concept of resilience has been the protagonist of an impressive interdisciplinary spill over. This article focuses on the difficulties of including this concept in the epistemic plane of the social sciences, and proposes an analysis of the limitations encountered when it is applied beyond physical and natural...

A syndemic is the co-existence of two or more health problems (including both social and biological features) that adversely influence each other with negative consequences on disease outcomes and perpetuation of inequalities. The syndemic approach can be applied to better understand the course of rheumatic musculoskeletal diseases (RMD) involving...

A consortium benchmarking (CB) approach was used to conduct a study on development mechanisms and best practices for Collective Action Initiatives (CAIs) in the energy sector. National research teams (NRTs) were created in six European countries (Belgium, Estonia, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Spain) each of which consisted of approximately f...

Social metabolism; nature/society nexus; technical apparatuses.

Numerous case studies show that citizens engage in various ways in renewable and low carbon energy projects, thereby contributing to the sustainable energy transition. To date, however, a systematic and cross-country database on citizen-led initiatives and projects is lacking. By performing a major compilation and reviewing copious data sources fro...

In recent years, collective action initiatives in the energy field, such as energy communities and cooperatives, have been gaining relevance both in the policy and in the social research domains as primary actors of energy transition. [...]

Since the mid-1990s, there has been a growing interest among consumers and producers in downscaling to a local level the length of the agri-food chains as a solution for fairer and more sustainable food production systems. From the point of view of consumption, the attribute “local” is assuming an important role in defining food purchasing preferen...

Energy communities (ECs), intended as collective action initiatives in the energy field involving citizens' participation, have been gaining relevance for the past decades as an alternative way to organize the energy chain to challenge the incumbent system. With Europe's recently adopted Clean Energy Package, ECs found a formal recognition by the E...

This paper provides novel additional evidence on the characteristics of Collective Action Initiatives (CAIs), investigating their role within the European energy sector. It analyses and presents results of a survey administered in six European countries: the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Poland, Estonia, and Spain. CAIs are studied in light of four...

This paper investigates the suitability of the community cooperatives (CC) model for the implementation of renewable energy communities (REC), as prescribed by art. 22 of EU Directive 2018/2001, and temporarily transposed into the Italian law by art. 42-bis of the Law Decree n. 162/2019. The hypothesis explored analyses the potential synergies betw...

The principles of Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability (FAIR) have been put forward to guide optimal sharing of data. The potential for industrial and social innovation is vast. Domain-specific metadata standards are crucial in this context, but are widely missing in the energy sector. This report provides a collaborative r...

The Climate Pact and the European Green Deal constitute the main components of the European Union (EU)'s climate change policy. Energy transition, that is, transformation to a zero-carbon global energy system, is one of the main pillars of climate change mitigation policies. This transformation, coupled with the empowerment of individuals within th...

This paper aims at addressing the exploitation of solid-state carriers for hydrogen storage, with attention paid both to the technical aspects, through a wide review of the available integrated systems, and to the social aspects, through a preliminary overview of the connected impacts from a gender perspective. As for the technical perspective, car...

The aim of this paper is to estimate the potential impacts of different COVID-19 scenarios on the Italian energy sector through 2030, with a specific focus on transport and industry. The analysis takes a multi-disciplinary approach to properly consider the complex interactions of sectors across Italy. This approach includes the assessment of econom...

This paper aims at addressing the exploitation of solid-state carriers for hydrogen storage, with attention paid both to the technical aspects, through a wide review of the available integrated systems, and to the social aspects, through a preliminary overview of the connected impacts from a gender perspective. As for the technical perspective, car...

Bio-waste could play a fundamental role in reaching the EU target to recycle 65% of municipal waste by 2035. The European waste policies and the Green New Deal are increasingly focusing on bio-waste enhancement, in particular within the Bioeconomy Strategy and the Circular Economy Package. Circular bioeconomy (CBE) combines these perspectives, with...

Energy communities (EC) are among the new actors in the energy market, playing an important role in the uptake of photovoltaics (PV) in European markets. This paper estimates their aggregate contribution to the low-carbon energy transition in terms of installed capacities for PV and evaluates their economic performance comparing with market prices....

This chapter describes the results of a sociological investigation carried out within an EU-funded project. The project was aimed at creating a tool to visualise and compute energy data at an urban district level, with the broader aim to optimise the local district heating (DH) network's distribution policies. This chapter identifies the features o...

The overall objective of this contribution is to investigate Collective Action Initiatives (CAIs) in the energy sector (e.g. energy communities, cooperatives and purchasing groups) as a trigger for the implementation of a strong sustainability paradigm. The assumption is that the active involvement of citizens in the energy chain is a crucial requi...

This conceptual paper applies a mobilization model to Collective Action Initiatives (CAIs) in the energy sector. The goal is to synthesize aspects of sustainable transition theories with social movement theory to gain insights into how CAIs mobilize to bring about niche-regime change in the context of the sustainable energy transition. First, we de...

Energy efficiency in buildings is a key issue in the current energy transition. In order to reduce building energy consumption, users’ behaviour and the perception of indoor environmental comfort must be taken into account; these aspects are inextricably linked to energy demand, consumption and related costs. In this paper, we present the methodolo...

The chapter explains the potential of complexity paradigm in describing the dynamics of contemporary electricity markets in their evolution from the traditional centralized form to a more dispersed structure. Current electric power systems, in fact, can be understood as complex adaptive systems in that they are composed by interrelated, heterogeneo...

Analysis of road crashes at the local level is necessary for targeting and implementing effective countermeasures. This chapter presents a contribution to this task. It describes the research carried out in Piedmont, Italy, where an exploratory approach has been used to link road crash data with information about the spatial characteristics of urba...

The basic premise of this volume is that the role of society is crucial in shaping the future path of developments in the geothermal sector. This chapter discusses some of the ways in which the science and technology in this field might be aligned with societal values and needs on a path for a sustainable transition towards a low carbon energy futu...

The climate question and the development of renewable energy technologies are at the heart of many national, communitarian and international policies, including the seven Gran Challenges described as major priorities by the European Union. The geological subsurface-both as source and storage of energy-can be one of the main resource for furthering...

By recalling the theoretical approach derived from the conceptual framework of Societal Metabolism the paper is focused on the relevance of renewing the concept of urban metabolism in order to better address urban environmental impact toward a more efficient metabolism of cities. Among other issues, prevention and reduction of urban solid waste hav...

Current challenges of mobility in urban and regional areas call for new approaches to the analysis of the transportation system. Technological progress and spreading of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) provide ground to the idea that a digital-age transportation system can be put in place. The text aims to contribute to the discussi...

The paper presents the results of an exploratory approach aimed at extending the ranking procedures normally used in studying the socioeconomics determinants of smart growth at the regional level. Most of these studies adopt a methodological procedure which essentially consists of the following steps: a) identification of the pertinent elementary i...

The paper deals with the role of ICT in innovating government’s and the whole process of “policy production process”. By enhancing the connections between various governmental and social organizations, ICT supported knowledge flow s and the associated Socio Technical System may be a vehicle to support innovation in the public sector. In fact, they...

As they create generative conditions for socioeconomic development ICTs and broadband technology, can be understood as an innovation kernel for system evolution. Whereas for a regional system (a local area), technological progress may at certain times be regarded as exogenous, information endowments and expected level of functionalities are not. An...