Politicised nexus thinking in practice: Integrating urban wastewater utilities into regional energy markets
研究了德国八个城市/区域将污水处理厂作为区域电力、燃气和供热市场“灵活性提供者”的实践，发现这不仅是技术调整，更是对现有物质、空间和制度配置的重大重组，是一个深刻的政治过程。
Infrastructures are key interfaces of urban resource use, connecting production to consumption, cities to their hinterland and energy to water and land use. They have, however, received scant attention in debates on nexus thinking in general, and the urban nexus in particular. Drawing on an emergent critical literature on the nexus in urban studies and science and technology studies, this article examines practices of (attempted) inter-sectoral infrastructure integration at the interface of urban wastewater treatment and regional energy provision in Germany. It analyses the nexus approaches and experiences of eight German cities / city-regions as so-called ‘flexibility providers’ in regional energy markets for electricity, gas and heating. It demonstrates how the practices of wastewater utilities operating in energy markets involve far more than technical adaptation, requiring in addition a major reordering of existing material, spatial and institutional configurations to both wastewater and energy systems. This is proving a deeply political process with important implications for our understanding of socio-technical transitions at the water-energy nexus.