Community Renewable Energy Ecologies (CREE): Rhizomatic renewable energy development and experimental–experiential emancipation

Abstract

The embodied multispecies injustices of the so-called renewable energy development foreground the vital need for radically different forms of forming renewable energy. However, very few specific alternative approaches have been proposed in literature, in line with a deficit of post-critical or post-humanist research on ‘renewable energy’ within, and outside, human geography. This paper concerns, delves deeper in, expands and refines an approach for post-capitalist renewable energy development published, called Community Renewable Energy Ecologies (CREE). It advances an ontological reframing of ‘renewable energy’, arguing that renewable energies need to be rethought as affective spatiotemporal relations between humans and the rest of the web of life that affirm and enable difference, autonomy and more flourishing socio-natural assemblages. Also, inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, it sketches rhizomatic renewable energy development for CREE, focusing in more detail on, amongst other things, relationships, alliances, the state's role, learning, scaling out and politics. Rhizomatic renewable energy development consists in a rhizome-like form of forming renewable energies and new socio-ecological arrangements, facilitating deterritorialization in existing socio-natural assemblages and their reterritorialization in new forms. It is constituted by three key features: rhizomatic alliances, minoritarian becomings and emancipatory experimental ethico-politics and rhizomatic learning. Community Renewable Energy Ecologies are re-envisioned as nomadic multiplicities involved in open and immanent post-capitalist experiments of rhizomatic renewable energy development able to nourish emancipation and broader socio-ecological transformation. Finally, the paper invites discussion and debate for imagining alternative renewable energy development futures beyond capitalism and how to facilitate them, in the spirit of ‘staying with the trouble’.