This paper reviews evidence on how the fast growth in renewable energy technologies can trigger social tipping dynamics that potentially accelerate a system-wide energy transition. It does so by reviewing a variety of literature across several disciplines addressing socio-technical dimensions of energy transitions. The tipping dynamics in wind and solar power create potential for cascading effects to energy demand sectors, including household energy demand. These most likely start with shift actions and adoption of household-scale batteries and heat pumps. Key enablers are strong regulations incentivising reductions in demand and setting minimum efficiency levels for buildings and appliances. While there is evidence of spillovers to more environmentally friendly behaviour, the extent of these and the key leverage points to bring them about present a knowledge gap. Moreover, these behavioural feedback loops require strong additional policy support to “make them stick”. Understanding the economic and social tipping dynamics in a system can empower decision-makers, fostering realistic energy transition policies. This paper highlights energy communities as a promising niche for leveraging tipping dynamics. Ultimately, bridging the gap between these tipping dynamics and institutional reforms is crucial for unlocking the full potential of sustainable energy systems.

The 'second phase' of the energy transition involves large-scale rollout of renewables, raising wider questions about arrangements for the management and ownership of such resources and how costs and benefits should be distributed. Ideas and practices such as 'community energy' and 'prosumption' capture the potential for more decentralised systems of ownership and control inherent in renewable energy technologies. However, until now, ownership and control of the key biophysical resources (e.g., wind, wave, solar, geothermal) underpinning the transition have received surprisingly little attention, given the potential for wealth creation and issues of justice that underpin their use. This paper explores this issue using the idea of 'wind rights', which highlights the numerous social actors who have rights or claims to use and benefit from wind resources. Key among these are landowners who are silently enclosing the 'windy commons' to extract 'wind rents' from monopoly property rights. This has profound (but undertheorised) distributive and structural ramifications for the energy transition. Despite this, and with some recent notable exceptions, much energy transition research in social science and humanities portrays landowners as taken-for-granted, apolitical, and sometimes marginal (ised) stakeholders. Combining a Marxist, class-based approach to landownership and wind rent with Ostromian institutional analysis, this paper reviews and expands the (predominantly legal) literature on wind rights. This deepens the understanding of the concept of 'wind rights', highlighting that in many instances wind resources are de facto privatised/enclosed via 'proxy wind rights' for landowners. We also indicate some alternative wind rights configurations, including nationally and commonly managed wind resources. This analysis leads to a consideration of the potential long-term benefits of alternative socially orientated property rights arrangements, including community wind rights or nationalisation of the wind resource. These social wind rights arrangements could play a key role in securing a more just and widely supported transition.