New political ecologies of renewable energy

Abstract

The critique of fossil fuel regimes has been a foundational concern for the field of political ecology, in its drives to expose the injustices and harms of energy extractivism and its early warnings of the climate crisis. However, it is increasingly evident that renewable energy sources and their infrastructures will carry their own costs and trade-offs, and that critique, resistance and alternative movement-building are needed to forge a truly just renewable energy transition. This theme issue underlines the many ways in which political ecology is well-positioned to lead critical and engaged scholarship in support of energy/climate justice. In this introduction and survey, we draw on new research collected here to reflect on political ecology's distinctive analytical capacities and forms of praxis for this task. We argue that the collection advances political ecology's intellectual and political purchase on renewable transition in several crucial ways. These include (1) Theorizing Renewables-Driven Land Transformations, (2) Advancing Industrial Political Ecologies of Renewables, (3) Locating Power within Technical and Artifactual Politics and (4) Generating Knowledge and Tools for Just Transitions. We conclude with reflections on further pressing concerns for the field: for example, rising debates over scale, ownership and accountability models within renewable energy justice and democracy movements and critical conversations growing around renewable energy's own extraction geographies and diverse forms of racialization.

Data infrastructure studies on an unequal planet

“…These extractive relations are recognizable, and the processes of resource making and refinement can appear somewhat familiar from older energetic resources like coal and oil to wind and data (see Bridge, 2011;Knuth et al, 2022). But wind and other intermittent renewable energy are emerging as unique resources of and for datafication, presenting an opportunity to demonstrate that while resources are culturally and discursively constructed (Bridge, 2011;Kama, 2020), the entanglements of data and intermittent renewable energy are distinctive to a particular transformation of energy delivery that will see the intensified presence of big tech within evolving energy systems.…”

“…But wind and other intermittent renewable energy are emerging as unique resources of and for datafication, presenting an opportunity to demonstrate that while resources are culturally and discursively constructed (Bridge, 2011; Kama, 2020), the entanglements of data and intermittent renewable energy are distinctive to a particular transformation of energy delivery that will see the intensified presence of big tech within evolving energy systems. Political ecologists and geographers have broadly theorized the ways that uneven development continue to shape the development of renewable energy as it replaces, at scale, carbon-intensive energetic resources, demonstrating the land grabbing and “green extractivism” that offer ostensibly decarbonized substitutes for the coal mines and oil wells of modernity (see Knuth et al, 2022; Voskoboynik and Andreucci, 2022). Data centers, in this assemblage, are both energetic outputs and infrastructures of energy transitions, meaning we need to be precise in how they are understood, imagined, and analyzed as essential industrial infrastructures for these expanding activities.…”

Technological power, complex systems, and boundary objects in global energy transitions

“…The production of solar panels, wind power plants, and electric cars is preceded by excavation that will produce piles of waste in the coming decades. As highlighted by energy geographers and political ecology scholars (Bridge et al, 2013;Kirby, 2015;McCarthy and Thatcher, 2019;Backhouse and Lehmann, 2020;Knuth et al, 2022), the transition to renewable energy involves the acquisition of land and resources on a massive scale, the spatial reorganisation of flows of power (in both senses of the word), money, materials, and people. In this context, governments are looking to consider less populated areas, hinterlands, mountaintops, and coasts as suitable places for large-scale solar and wind generation and as preferred sites for land-extensive mining and waste dumping.…”

Smart energopower: Energy, work and waste within a UK smart grid trial

“…Baptista, 2015;Barry, 2013;Mitchell, 2011;Silver, 2015). Recent contributions have turned their attention to the 'new political ecologies of renewable energy', highlighting issues such as associated shifts in land usage, industrial processes, material politics and questions of 'just transition' (Knuth et al, 2022). Rather than treating energy resources and infrastructures as assets or things, relational ontologies of energy have become commonplace within political ecology (Calvert, 2016;Huber, 2015): resources and infrastructures are conceptualised as socio-ecological relations, which is to say that their 'biophysical capacities only come to be mobilised in specific historical circumstances and through particular social relations' (Huber, 2013: 4).…”