Rescaling Energy? Räumliche Neuordnungen in der deutschen Energiewende

Abstract

Kurzfassung. The German energy transition is not only characterized by wide technological changes but also by spatial restructuring. The decentralization of energy supply potentially increases the importance of the regional or local scale. The Anglo-American debate on the Politics of Scale addresses the production and transformation of scale while energy issues have not yet been systematically addressed. This paper combines the theoretical paradigms of scale, rescaling and scalar strategies with empirical examples from the German energy transition. Using the cases of energy regions, remunicipalizations and social movements, the implications of the German energy transition are analyzed regarding the role of scale. The paper argues that the perspective of the Politics of Scale can contribute not only to a better understanding of the different dimensions of energy transitions but also to critical energy geographies in general.

Financialization, dependence, and state regulation: The accumulation strategies of German energy companies in Hungary

“…The integration of Hungary and Eastern Europe into global value chains led by German companies has been scrutinized primarily in the field of the automotive industry (Gerőcs et al, 2021;Jipa-Muşat and Prevezer, 2023;Pavlínek, 2022;Pavlínek et al, 2009). Energy companies and public utilities have not been the focus of the global value chain literature on Eastern Europe; they have also featured less prominently in works on German energy geography (Becker and Naumann, 2017;Klagge and Anz, 2014). What makes this oversight puzzling is that German energy companies have been dependent on shareholdings in other countries for the past 25-30 years.…”

“…Existing literature on energy companies and public utility firms has revealed three main scales and modes of accumulation. Research has explored how corporations extract value from local households, mediated by state regulation at the national level (Becker and Naumann, 2017; Furlong, 2020b; Harrison, 2022; Juwet and Deruytter, 2021). Scholarship has analyzed also the transnational scale of value appropriation through geographically uneven development and dependent structures of global capitalism, similar to the dependencies upon which extractive industries and manufacturing value chains are built (Parker et al, 2018; Pavlínek, 2022).…”

Editorial: Infrastructures and migration

“…Infrastructures are analysed from the perspective of political economy (Graham and Marvin, 2001;McFarlane and Rutherford, 2008;Warf, 2003;Thiele, 2020), political ecology (Gandy, 2002(Gandy, , 2014Heynen et al, 2006;Becker and Naumann, 2017), feminist research approaches (Siemiatycki et al, 2019;Carstensen, 2018;Marquardt, 2018), postcolonial theory (Chattopadhyay, 2012;Lawhon et al, 2018)…”

“…In doing so, these approaches are also sometimes intertwined, as in the feminist political ecology of Sultana (2011) or the postcolonial yet governance-oriented work of Kooy and Bakker (2008). Here, the focus is on social power relations, the socio-materiality of infrastructures and their socioecological modes of action (see, for example, Nielson et al, 2021;Flitner et al, 2017;Becker and Naumann, 2017).…”

Socio-spatial dimensions in energy transitions: Applying the TPSN framework to case studies in Germany

“…Scales are never fixed, but are constantly restructured in terms of their extent, content, relative importance, and interrelations (Swyngedouw, 2010: 9). In energy geography, it is acknowledged that the multiple scales of an energy system do not exist per se , but as a result of a politics of scale and connected rescaling strategies in the energy system (Becker and Naumann, 2017; Bridge, 2018).…”