Tag Archives: Environment

Features, The Political Power of Energy Futures

Dragan Djunda: Transition to nowhere: Small hydro, little electricity, and large profits in Serbia

This post is part of a feature on “The Political Power of Energy Futures,” moderated and edited by Katja Müller (MLU Halle-Wittenberg), Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Bergen), and Kirsten W. Endres (MPI Halle).

When you enter the House of culture in Dojkinci, a small village on Stara Mountain, you are instantly amazed by its floor. The freshly painted red, green, and blue patterns revived the previously cracked ground. These traditional geometrical shapes are landmarks of ćilim – a centuries-old weaving technique of wool from sheep herds on the Stara Mountain. Few steps inside, and you are surrounded by the large photographs of nature, people, and customs characteristic of this mountain in eastern Serbia. Only a year ago the walls covered by the photographs were molded due to the damaged roof and windows. The building was empty and in decay. It became again the center of the village’s social life after

Image 1: House of Culture Dojkinci. Meeting between the villagers, the architects and the movement Let’s defend the rivers of the Stara Mountain regarding a new revitalization project (photo by the author, 2020)

the villagers together with architecture students and their teachers and the grassroots movement Odbranimo reke Stare planine (Let’s defend the rivers of Stara Mountain) renovated this building in 2019 as an act of resistance to the threat of small hydropower plants (SHPPs). SHPPs consist of several kilometers-long pipelines, which channel water to the turbines where the electricity is produced, threatening to leave the riverbeds dry and local communities without water. The more water the pipe holds, the more electricity the turbine creates and the more profit through subsidies it brings to private investors. Thus, for the local villagers and environmental activists the pipes of SHPPs came to symbolize greed, environmental destruction, and social marginalization.

The SHPP in Dojkinci, together with almost 3000 plants in the Western Balkan countries, arose from the network of national capitalists, European banks, and the national energy sectors responding to the EU accession standards. However, Dojkinci and other villages in the Stara Mountain did not succumb to such a wide front of interests. My contribution examines how this happened. I will firstly explain how SHPPs emerged from the Serbian renewable energy (RES) market, and then describe the social responses triggered by SHPPs. 

Renewables between liberalization and water-grabbing

The Serbian RES market emerged from the pressures for liberalizing the energy market, the government’s resistance, and the inflows of Western European capital. The liberalization of the energy sector in the EU candidate-countries is part of the broad legal, economic and political compliance to EU standards. The EU expects the Serbian energy sector to go through a double transformation. From a state-owned system that is largely dependent on coal, the sector should become competitive, decentralized, at least partly privatized, and promote renewable energy. This ambitious task unifies both liberalization and energy transition, keeping the logic of the free market as their leading principle. In the early 2010s, the Serbian government established the foundations of the RES market, consisting of a certification procedure for green electricity producers and fixed-rate feed-in tariffs (FITs) guaranteeing beneficial prices for 12 years.  FITs are the means of subsidizing renewable energy production. They are paid by all citizens through their electricity bills and transferred to the producers in a form of subsidized electricity prices

If it had followed entirely the prescribed logic of unfettered competition, the Serbian RES market could have had severe social, political, and economic effects. The state’s monopoly could have turned into an oligopoly of European companies, with FITs pushing up the low electricity prices – repeating developments already seen in Spain (Franquesa 2018). To prevent this scenario, the government found a middle way: to establish the RES market but prevent significant changes. It limited access to FITs through technology and capacity caps. These limitations targeted large investors in wind and solar, but also local people interested in installing small numbers of solar panels on private property. Foreign investors quickly filled the quotas for wind power subsidized by FITs. Only one channel for investments remained wide open – around 800 locations for SHPPs in mountainous, often protected regions.

Investors and authorities claimed that hydropower is identical to wind and solar sources. The ideology of untapped hydro potentials, anchored in the socialist technological heritage, is widespread among Serbian engineers and continuously supported by all Serbian governments since the 2000s. The costs for planned SHPPs were lower because expertise in the hydropower construction sector already exists since socialism. Moreover, SHPPs technology is not as capital-intensive and dependent on the economy of scales as larger solar and wind parks. This combination of technological and economic factors meant that the costs were low and that smaller investors could easily access the financial market. Alongside the international banks and a few private investors from Western Europe, people with close affiliation to the Serbian ruling party invested in and owned the new SHPPs, among them, the godfather of the Serbian president. This implies that after repaying credits for the SHPPs, the profits gained through FITs would stay within the circles of national capitalists unlike profits from foreign-owned wind or solar parks. The purpose of SHPPs was not to transform the energy sector, as they only contribute to the national electricity production with 2.5%, but rather to guarantee easy profits through FITs.

Even though SPPSs investors were usually local capitalist, it does not mean that it has not been a lucrative opportunity also for foreign capital in the region. European financial institutions and manufacturers of hydro equipment have followed a well-established path of foreign direct investments that have transformed the political, economic, and social fabrics of the postsocialist countries. SHPPs have been a good opportunity for the Western European producers of hydro equipment to reanimate an industry drowning because of the current rush for wind and solar sources. Hydro lobbies organized conferences that connected national energy authorities, public producers of electricity, manufacturers, and financiers, to consider new fruitful investments. Foreign financial capital played a key role in supporting SHPPs in the region. Most of the credits for SHPPs in Serbia came from commercial banks such as Erste Bank, UniCredit, Banka Intesa, and Société Général. Large financial institutions like European Investment Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, together with Norwegian, Austrian, German, and Italian development banks, poured hundreds of millions of euros into greenfield hydro projects in the region (Bankwatch 2019).

In this context, environmental and local community protection mechanisms were hardly implemented and succumbed to the immense pressure of national and international capital and power. The government lowered environmental standards, allowing the RES market to turn into water-grabbing. Researchers from the University of Belgrade identified on all inspected SHPPs malfunctioning or dry paths for fish migration and pipes unlawfully built-in riverbeds. They argued that the rule of “biological minimum”, which was supposed to guarantee the minimum level of water in riverbeds to sustain the river, was conducted by experts close to the investors and without systematic, often costly studies (Ristić et al 2018). This “biological minimum” therefore could not limit the investors’ arithmetic transformations of water into kWh and FITs, leaving behind dry riverbeds especially in protected areas with high biodiversity, such as the Stara Mountain.

Struggles against SHPPs

I first visited the village Topli Do in the Stara Mountain in December 2019, while the residents had been barricading the bridge in the village for three months to stop an investor from trying to build two SHPPs on both rivers flowing through their village. Most of them were retired people and small-scale agricultural producers, fearing that SHPPs would disturb the underground water that they use for drinking, as well as pollute and reduce the water in rivers for livestock and gardens. Numerous springs and waterfalls attract many visitors to the village, and the villagers were afraid that SHPPs would spoil both natural exceptionality and their opportunity for supplementary incomes through room rentals.

Image 2: Panorama of Topli Do (Photo by the author, 2019)

Residents of Topli Do and nearby villages recognized the state and investors as the main perpetrators and directed their anger towards them. But they also conveyed their existential anxieties through narratives of the “approaching global wars for water”, “international corporations stealing water”, and “extinction of their communities for settling migrants” from the Middle East who lived in a refugee camp in the nearby town of Pirot. These anxieties sprouted from the long-term sentiments of the vanishing of Serbian villages where mostly elderly people live. Decaying homes and infrastructure, closed schools, and ambulances are the material witnesses to rural flight. In this context of social degradation, the investors and local authorities promoted SHPPs as opportunities for development. The locals told me that the municipality fabricated the mandatory consultations with them, and portrayed SHPPs as benevolent water mills, and promised benefits for everyone – temporarily employed local workers and landowners near the rivers. “I wanted to bring improvement to this village which has had nothing, I brought my one million euros”, the investor in Topli Do SHPP said in a documentary film about the Topli Do barricade (Marinković 2020).

“The investor even asked us why defending the villages of the Stara Mountain when they would anyway disappear in a few years”, one activist told me. Between 2017 and 2020, the movement Let’s defend the rivers of Stara Mountain resisted heavily SHPPs in Stara planina through protests, legal actions, and physical clashes. Through its actions, the movement connected villagers in Stara planina, academics, environmental NGOs, and international organizations with their pan-European campaigns against SHPPs in the Balkans. Finally, faced with such a broad resistance, the local municipality terminated all SHPPs in the Stara Mountain in September 2020.

Image 3: Protest banners in Topli Do: ‘A lot of money, little energy, zero fish’ and ‘For rivers to death’ (Photo by the author, 2019)

I came again to the Stara Mountain during the pandemic in October 2020, this time in Temska and Dojkinci villages. The mood was post-victorious since villages were not endangered anymore by SHPPs. The activists and locals thought about how to use the momentum and transform the symbolic capital of the river defenders into something more. They looked for financial and institutional support for infrastructure, housing, research centers, and small-scale businesses in the Stara Mountain, and the House of culture in Dojkinci was a result of these efforts. Revitalizations were both immediate reactions to the threatening devastation from SHPPs, and opportunities to demonstrate that revival of the disappearing rural communities was possible and necessary. For the locals, these renovated objects represented debt repayments to ancestors and predecessors and a promise that life in the Stara Mountain would not end, as the leader in one of the villages told me.

Unlike in other Serbian mountains, the SHPPs paradoxically rescued the villages in the Stara Mountain from disappearance and marginalization by reviving the local communities and garnering the support of the Serbian civil society. Attempts to make profits from greenwashing unexpectedly turned into a second chance for some Serbian communities.

Whose market, whose energy transition?

SHPPs were supposed to maintain a status quo in the energy sector – to represent a Godotian energy transition that never arrives and does not go anywhere. However, the wide social resistance turned energy transition from a techno-bureaucratic matter in to an issue decisive for society’s future. This change led to questions about who has access to the RES market, who gets benefits from it, and what role society plays in the energy transition.

These questions are becoming prominent among newly forming energy cooperatives interested in small-scale investments in solar energy. So far, they have been largely excluded from the RES market, not recognized as potential producers, and therefore unable to apply for FITs. Energy cooperatives criticize the closedness of the market to “ordinary people” and aspire to unify activism and business initiative allowing citizens to become active drivers of the energy transition and simultaneously benefit from FITs. Therefore, solar panels are trying to make their way to the roofs of urban dwellings to demonstrate sustainable and market-democratic alternatives open nominally to everyone.

While the aspiring cooperatives are wishing for a more inclusive market, experts and regional media specialized in energy are also calling for more and better markets, i.e. for the usual liberalization that supposedly corrects market distortions with improved market mechanisms. They wish for competition between big investors with access to credit and technology, which would ensure that the public gets measurable and less expensive electricity from renewable sources. This belief in the market as the only vehicle of energy transition follows the EU agenda which emphasizes decentralized, competitive, and interconnected national markets. Public tenders and premiums will most likely be implemented in Serbia’s new energy laws. These laws will launch a new race between large foreign and national investors in wind and solar power.

Such investors wish for a free, unregulated market. A free market which gives space to big and small producers, fosters innovations and initiative. This kind of market is seen as a more fair and sustainable solution than the one favoring SHPPs through FITs. But whose market and energy transition will that be? And the transition to what? The competition between large investors will hardly open substantial space for the development of energy cooperatives. The odds for a more democratic and just energy transition are slim if the promise of the decarbonization of the Western Balkan countries conveys the ultimatum of oligopolies.

Dragan Djunda is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University. His doctoral research analyses the investments in renewable energy in Serbia and their social effects.

Bibliography

Franquesa, Jaume. 2018. Power Struggles: Dignity, Value, and the Renewable Energy Frontier in Spain. Indiana University Press.

Marinković, Zorica. dir. 2020. Topli Do – donžon Stare planine” [Topli Do – donjon of the Stara Mountain].

Ristić, Ratko, Ivan Malušević, Siniša Polovina, Vukašin Milčanović, Boris Radić. 2018. Male hidroelektrane derivacionog tipa: Beznačajna energetska korist i nemerljiva ekološka šteta. VODOPRIVREDA, Vol. 50 [Derivate small hydropower plants: Insignificant energy contribution and unmeasurable ecological damage].

Bankwatch, 2019. “Western Balkans Hydropower: Who Pays, Who Profits?” Accessed February 23, 2021. https://bankwatch.org/publication/western-balkans-hydropower-who-pays-who-profits.

Cite as: Djunda, Dragan. 2021. “Transition to nowhere: Small hydro, little electricity, and large profits in Serbia.” FocaalBlog, 9 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/09/dragan-djunda-transition-to-nowhere-small-hydro-little-electricity-and-large-profits-in-serbia/

Features, The Political Power of Energy Futures

Felix Lussem: Alienating “facts” and uneven futures of energy transition

This post is part of a feature on “The Political Power of Energy Futures,” moderated and edited by Katja Müller (MLU Halle-Wittenberg), Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Bergen), and Kirsten W. Endres (MPI Halle).

We are in the middle of the Rhineland’s lignite mining region, a semi-urban to rural area in the west of Germany. The landscape is considerably altered by past and present projects of large-scale resource extraction and subsequent “recultivation” measures to convert the land back to agricultural production or natural conservation. Lignite (or brown coal) is exploited in vast open-pit mines here – the Hambach mine not far from the city of Cologne is dubbed “Europe’s biggest hole” – “swallowing” everything from forests to villages in their way.

Coal mining – in contrast to the more authoritarian and centralized organization of oil extraction – has been historically associated with the development of the welfare state and the consolidation of workers’ rights in western democracies. However, as Thomas H. Eriksen notes, “contemporary coal mining has been restructured and reconfigured to resemble oil drilling formally”, becoming “less labour-intensive and more capital-intensive than in the past” (2016: 38). This neoliberal restructuring resulted not only in the transformation of institutions of “Carbon Democracy” (Mitchell 2009), as the conditions for workers to organize and wield influence over the means of production were eroded, but also in declining economic dependency on the coal industry in the Rhineland region.

Despite this decrease of economic significance in the region, RWE, the energy company currently operating the mines, has still been considerably involved in local politics over the past decades – not least because of its mandate to secure the provision of cheap electricity for German industry and consumers. To this day the state-approved “general public interest” serves as the legal basis for the suspension of fundamental rights, making possible the expropriation of land titles, the demolition of protected landmarks, or the circumvention of guidelines for environmental protection for the extraction of fossil fuels in Germany’s lignite mining regions.

Excavators, conveyor belts and terrace landscape in the Hambach open-pit mine
Image 1: A new energy horizon after the end of the world? Excavators, conveyor belts and terrace landscape in the Hambach open-pit mine (Picture taken by the author)

Environmental destruction and relocation of tens of thousands of people due to numerous mine expansions in the Rhineland were thus firmly connected to narratives of national progress and regional prosperity. Mourning over losses of personal possessions and feelings of belonging were relegated to the private realm, and little room was left for critical voices in the public domain.

Recently however, this hegemonic state-industry nexus has been successfully challenged by a coalition of environmentalists, citizen initiatives, radical activists and other civil society actors (despite the continued economic profitability of the coal industry, ensured by “environmental load displacement” (Hornborg 2009) and other indirect subsidies). Their demands to save the remaining forest in front of the Hambach mine effectively stopped the encroaching extractivist operation. They were supported by a government commission installed to negotiate the conditions of Germany’s energy transition, following the decision to phase out the coal industry as a national contribution toward climate change mitigation.

The prospect of a global climate crisis has therefore led to the current reevaluation of lignite mining from guarantor of wealth and stability to driver of multi-scalar uncertainties. This enabled previously marginalized actors to voice their concerns by articulating their demands in terms of these globalized discourses. Yet, the (inter-)nationally reported success of the protests around the Hambach forest was only one instance of ongoing negotiations about the pace and scale of energy transition, from the perspective of the critical civil society actors with whom I conduct research in the Rhineland.

Since this seeming breakthrough for civic participation in shaping the region’s future, numerous setbacks and scandals have occurred. These are testament to the inability of carbon-democratic institutions to deal with a crisis that challenges its basic principles of growth as progress and wage labor as key to well-being. Controversies range from the passing of a coal exit law that many critical voices interpret as a “coal extension law”, to the federal government holding back an official report that questions the energetic necessity of the energy company’s plans for mine expansion.

Before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, I regularly participated in meetings of a local group of critical civil society actors who played a decisive role in saving the forest and turning it into a national symbol of climate activism. Their political engagement served as an opportunity to take a closer look at the uneven futures of energy transition in the Rhineland. As we sit in a circle in the Protestant church hall of a village close to the Hambach mine, many of the participants share impressions of feeling alienated from their home region by the energy company’s mining activities. Despite being part of the majority that does not depend on the coal industry for income, some of the locals feel their concerns were generally ignored by communal politics, making them rather skeptical of established political institutions’ capability to develop a sustainable and equitable future for the mining region.

Nonetheless, they see the impending process of energy transition as a window of opportunity to reconnect with their home region by actively participating in the development of alternative future visions, beyond institutions of representative democracy. This desire for autonomous participation is directly linked to the affective alienation associated by some of my interlocutors with the large-scale landscape transformation of the mining activities, coupled with the close connection between local politics and the energy company.

This carbon-democratic entanglement of political institutions and energy industry experienced in everyday life in the Rhineland’s lignite mining region probably finds its most drastic manifestation in the practice of “creating facts” (“Fakten schaffen”), of which my interlocutors often accuse the mining company. This expression usually refers to the practice of producing accomplished facts which alter conditions in a way to favor certain outcomes. Often their undeniable materiality forces other actors to acknowledge these facts, in turn leading to the retrospective legitimization of the outcomes of Fakten schaffen. Thus, actors with the power and institutional support to “create facts” narrow down an otherwise ambiguous situation potentially open to negotiation by different actors to a specific path of options in their interest.

In this way the energy company continues the controversial destruction of almost completely relocated villages. Under Germany’s new energy policy, the company is sticking to its operating plan and regular rhythm of extraction and redevelopment, despite radically changing socioecological and energy-political parameters. While numerous critical actors unsuccessfully appeal to democratic institutions to inhibit this pursuit of enforcing prior arrangements through material destruction, the following, more ambiguous example will serve to illustrate this modus operandi of Fakten schaffen and its relation to the feeling of alienation.

Photo of solar panels aligning fossil fuel transportation infrastructure near the Hambach forest
Image 2: “Path dependency” – literal and figurative: Solar panels aligning fossil fuel transportation infrastructure near the Hambach forest (Picture taken by the author)

Thomas, an outspoken and very knowledgeable member of a local citizen initiative against coal mining, and part of the larger group of civil society actors mentioned above, gives me a ride to the train station after we participated in one of the regular protest-walks through the forest at the Hambach mine. As we pass the bridge over the railway connecting the mines with the nearby power plants, I decide to ask him about the solar panels aligning the tracks beneath us. Their sheer size hardly makes them unnoticeable, but I never paid much attention to them, except for contemplating the irony that the fossil fuel infrastructure gives room to more “sustainable” forms of energy generation here. After all, the solar panels seemed somewhat out of place next to passing trains packed with lignite. The panels simultaneously signal the out-of-time-ness of the coal industry and point to a new energy future on the horizon.  But Thomas’ reaction to my question made me aware of another aspect regarding their significance for the issue of affective alienation in relation to the practice of Fakten schaffen.

Knowing that most of my interlocutors are in favor of direct solar energy generation and having the impressive photovoltaic structure right before our eyes, I am prepared to finally hear a success story about civic participation in local development. Yet, Thomas is not sympathetic to the photovoltaic project at all. He tells me it was a typical outcome of cooperation between energy company and politics in the region.

This sentiment echoes many civil society actors who criticize that, being the biggest landowner there, RWE conducts itself “like the lord of a manor” (“Gutsherrenart”), demonstrating the “feudal” excesses of carbon democracy in the Rhineland, which regularly undermine popular desires of stronger democratic involvement in matters of future-making. Thomas goes on to inform me that a citizen initiative proposed a similar project a few years ago in which the solar panels ought to be lining the highway that was relocated closer to the village because of the encroaching mine. They had imagined the photovoltaic structure as serving multiple other functions, such as protecting villagers from noise and air pollution emitted by the mine and highway. While the project gained some attention in the local press, it was not supported by the communal administration and ultimately had to be relinquished.

Around the same time, the energy company came to an agreement with the administration to make property available for the hitherto largest photovoltaic project in the region, co-financed by a local bank. The uncanny speed with which this project was realized confirmed not only the close ties between politics and coal industry to critical actors like Thomas, but also showed clearly how easily something can be achieved in the region when the energy company is directly involved.

So instead of being perceived as a successful step towards sustainable energy transition in the Rhineland’s lignite mining area, the solar panels symbolize a failure of civic participation. They appear to Thomas as a material (arte-)fact resulting from the dubiously close cooperation between local politics and the energy company. Judged from a distance, this instance of Fakten schaffen produced a material outcome in line with my interlocutors’ desires for sustainable energy generation. However, the concrete infrastructure stands as a monument that exemplifies how flows of innovation are caught up in existing power relations and ultimately contribute to consolidating the local incarnation of the state-industry nexus, even in the face of impending coal exit.

While the lignite industry will disappear in the foreseeable future, the longstanding history of capitalist extractivism – the main reason for the affective alienation of a large group of people in the area – will likely continue, no matter the source of energy. The deliberate promotion of technoscientific development interventions carried out by experts in the context of energy transition policies thus works to forestall the socioecological transformation from below that Thomas and others envision as a necessary step for politics in the Anthropocene.

Nowhere does this become more apparent than in the economic ministry’s newly adopted rhetoric of establishing a special economic zone in the area to speed up planning processes and pursue the double-bind of “green growth” (Eriksen 2016). Meanwhile, they were simultaneously hosting forums for civic participation that seem disconnected from this pursuit, because they operate at a different pace. This contradictory course of action leads many local actors to evaluate the efforts to integrate civil society into official planning processes as a mere façade, intensifying their skepticism towards institutions of carbon democracy in the region.

This brief insight into my fieldwork shows how inhabitants that felt alienated by collusions between energy industry and political institutions, sensed the diverging interest of politics and industry in the context of energy transition as an opportunity to regain some autonomy over the shaping of their region’s future. However, instances of Fakten schaffen enacted by the state-industry nexus function to curtail this grassroots engagement, and to (re-)connect extractive infrastructures of late industrialism (Fortun 2014) to narratives of modernization and progress under the aegis of “green growth”.

A coalition of local actors more attuned to the socioecological uncertainties of the Anthropocene criticizes this carbon-democratic variant of “cruel optimism” (Berlant 2011), and pushes for a joint transformation of resource use and political culture in search of a redefined “good life” for all. Rather than a utopian vision of future prosperity, this practical engagement might be characterized as “patchy hope” (Tsing et al. 2019) which, despite being situated and emplaced, operates between the particular and the universal, the local and the global; aware of its own limitations within ambiguous entanglements of politics and energy in the Rhineland.

Felix Lussem is a research assistant and lecturer in the field of environmental anthropology at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne, Germany. His doctoral research deals with shifting spatial and temporal orders in negotiations of “global crises” with a regional focus on the Rhineland’s lignite mining area. Contact: flussem2@uni-koeln.de

Bibliography

Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham & London: Duke University Press.

Eriksen, Thomas H. 2016. Overheating. An Anthropology of Accelerated Change. London: Pluto Press.

Fortun, Kim. 2014. From Latour to late industrialism. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (1): 309-329.

Hornborg, Alf. 2009. Zero-Sum World: Challenges in Conceptualizing Environmental Load Displacement and Ecologically Unequal Exchange in the World-System. International Journal of Comparative Sociology 50 (3-4): 237-262.

Mitchell, Timothy. 2009. Carbon democracy. Economy and Society 38 (3): 399-432.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, Andrew S. Mathews & Nils Bubandt. 2019. Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape Structure, Multispecies History, and the Retooling of Anthropology. Current Anthropology 60 (Supplement 20): S000.

Cite as: Lussem, Felix. 2021. “Alienating ‘facts’ and uneven futures of energy transition.” FocaalBlog, 7 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/07/felix-lussem-alienating-facts-and-uneven-futures-of-energy-transition/