Economic Models in the Low Carbon Energy Transition at the Local Level.

Summary Faced with the urgency of the fight against global warming, the low-carbon energy transition is a societal transition that constitutes a real challenge due to its singularities. The conditions for its realization lie in a multi-level political steering in order to act now on the different possible levers of action. Indeed, the States intervene on the one hand during international negotiations in order to reach a universal agreement on the climate, and on the other hand in the legislation of their national regulatory framework. Local authorities also intervene because of their competences which give them a significant power of influence on decentralized production modes and on energy consumption. The local level plays a key role because it benefits from the bonds of proximity and trust that encourage collective action and constitute a real leverage effect. It is at the local level that energy transition projects emerge and that the fight against global warming takes shape. This is why it is necessary to understand what types of local projects for the energy transition are emerging, and what their performance is from an economic, social and environmental point of view. This will allow public authorities to identify the types of efficient projects to encourage their development, and also to identify the obstacles to be removed in order to encourage the emergence of innovative projects. In the long term, the aim is to understand which types of projects will be deployed and generalized within the framework of the energy transition according to the type of value they will manage to generate. In order to answer this question, the business model approach is relevant: it constitutes an analysis grid allowing to determine the characteristics of each project, by describing its value proposition and the configuration of this value, and to determine its viability and sustainability according to the creation (or destruction) of values (economic, financial, social, environmental) that it generates. The thesis thus proposes a typology of energy transition business models at the local level, a project analysis grid adapted to the societal challenge represented by the energy transition and finally proposes recommendations for public policy in terms of evaluating the economic, social and environmental performance of local energy transition projects.