In recent years, I have been studying the development of renewable energy in Spain with the aim of developing a better understanding of energy transitions. My research shows that energy transitions are nonlinear processes that open possibilities for new social arrangements, but it also highlights the ways that such new social arrangements rework inherited relationships of power. In this paper I want to elaborate on this idea by focusing on the way big electrical corporations have been mobilizing the current context of economic crisis to rewrite energy policy. As a result, these big corporations are able to consolidate and extend into the future their position of control over the energy system, understood here to include not only technologies and resources, but also more crucially the social structures and relations of production sustaining their operation (Debeir et al. 1991 [1986]).
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