Research topic: Supporting renewable energy deployment: exploring routes from research into practice
Research pathway: Environmental Planning
Host institution: Cardiff University

This fellowship builds upon my PhD research and provides the platform to disseminate the key success factors that need to be in place for the delivery of renewable energy deployment. My PhD investigated the mechanisms that lead to an effective diffusion of renewable energy technologies, exploring their spatial differential (how and where these technologies might be deployed), and examining the relationship between energy and materiality. The research highlighted several material dimensions of renewable energy discussing and unpacking why, and in what ways, they matter, and why it is important to give them consideration.

Conceptually, the PhD work showed that stressing the material dimensions of renewable energy offers an opportunity to explain how particular renewable energy resources come to be fashioned in some areas and not in others. Analytically, it provided an empirical framework within which the issues of materiality can be explored. This heuristic approach has been valuable in explaining spatial differences in Italy and the UK and can be adopted for further comparative empirical investigations.

The fellowship will explore further the synergies between recent and current research from different scientific disciplines and theoretical perspectives that can improve our understanding of – and how to identify and address- the opportunities that renewable energy deployment and innovation entails. The fellowship will provide the opportunity to share and expand upon my research findings, engaging relevant interdisciplinary academics. This will be achieved through joint publications, presentations and academic exchange and networking activities. The fellowship will offer the opportunity to share the insights from the PhD and its practical implications with research users, making research findings usable and accessible and exploring routes from research into practice. It will support the refinement of policy advice and recommendations aimed at improving the design of future policy intervention.

Email: delaurentisc@cardiff.ac.uk
Website: https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/people/view/1702852-de-laurentis-carla
twitter: @delaurentisc