Abstract/Summary

Against the background of climate change, achieving sustainable urban energy transition is claimed to be urgent. Deploying building-applied solar panels can contribute to reducing carbon emission in cities. Since many buildings in the UK cities are owned by institutions, this study enquiries into the consideration of these institutional property owners over solar panel deployment on their buildings. Literature suggests that such consideration is likely to, firstly, engage a wider range of actors than solely the property owners, and secondly, concern specific situations of particular cases. Assemblage theory is adopted to define and analyse this study’s main interest in the assemblage of institutional property owners’ deployment of building-applied solar panels. A local level focus helps methodologically match the likely case specificity while at the same time manage the scope of empirical fieldwork consisting of in-depth interviews. Nottingham in the UK appears to be a place of best-practice which can enable both a focused scope and sufficient data availability for the fieldwork. The relational perspectives of institutional property ownership help engage the variant interactions among heterogeneous human and non-human actors in the assemblage of institutional property owners’ deployment of solar panels on buildings. Under such assemblage understanding, solar panel deployment progresses through contingent processes, and outcomes emerge from such progression. Institutional property owners’ consideration can be conceptualised as the virtual space of possibilities. In such virtual space, heterogeneous elements throughout social-material processes are virtually assembled. The empirical data suggest that only the highly cost-effective projects are likely to be territorialised to the degree of enabling the assemblage to empirically emerge. Payback period and scale of projects are important coding components that reinforce cost-effectiveness as territorialisation. The assemblage of institutional property owners’ deployment of building-applied solar panels often emerges together with other assemblages of assemblages, such as holistic programmes of building retrofit.