Tag Archives: Political ecology

Anticipatory Perspectives on the Post-Corona Crisis Economy, Blog, Features

Sandy Smith-Nonini: Energy Crises in the Time of Covid: Precarious Fossil Infrastructures

The spectacle of Russia invading Ukraine has elevated tensions over Europe’s access to natural gas and may herald a sea-change in regional geopolitics of energy. But prior to Putin’s war, energy crises played out across dozens of countries in 2021. Ramped up economic demand in the fourth quarter contributed to many, but there were forewarnings of instability – from rolling blackouts during California wildfires to over 200 bankruptcies of US gas fracking companies since 2015 due to high debt and low prices.

Ironically, Coronavirus lockdowns in early 2020 accomplished in one fell swoop what divestment activists only dreamed of when oil and gas stocks crashed, leading to a write-off of $145 billion in oil/gas assets by year’s end. But outcomes to date do not include greening. The US government rescued the industry with $120 billion in direct and indirect pandemic stimulus funds and benefits. The industry diverted the largess into stock buybacks and dividends, rather than invest in (green or brown) production.

The fragility of gas infrastructure involves more than financial debt. As a surge of Covid-19 cases overwhelmed Texas hospitals in February 2021, a wicked polar vortex and ice storm brought the state to a standstill due to prolonged blackouts caused by frozen gas lines, leaving over 5 million families without heat in the extreme cold, some for up to a week. Temperatures fell to 6° F (-14° C) in Austin, where lows seldom drop below 40° F (4.4° C).  

More crises followed. In June, just weeks after a private consortium took over Puerto Rico’s rickety electric grid, a substation fire and a series of blackouts left a million islanders without power. By fall ongoing grid failures prompted mass protests from a weary public that had only three years earlier gotten the lights back on after an 11-month blackout from Hurricane María.  Prolonged outages also followed Hurricane Ida’s August landfall in New Orleans.

Protesters march down a street, holding signs that say "Luz para Caguas" and "¿Y Caguas pa' cuando? ¡Nuestra gente necesita luz!"
Image 1: Puerto Ricans from dozens of small towns protesting in San Juan for power restoration four months after Hurricane Maria, photo by Marla Perez-Lugo

Then as economic demand rose in the fall, fuel shortages and high coal and gas prices spurred energy crises in Europe (especially the United Kingdom), Pakistan, Singapore, China, India, South Korea and Lebanon, including blackouts and/or steep hikes in electric bills. The high gas prices reflected, in part, low production from collapsed demand in 2020 that left US frackers  dependent on previously drilled wells, while lenders, burned from bankruptcies, were hesitant to extend them credit. Tensions with Russia, source of over a third of EU gas supplies, added to perceived risks. Pandemic economic stresses contributed to energy crises, as did extreme weather and grid fragilities from poor maintenance during decades of utility deregulation.

This essay discusses the social and political costs of energy crisis, with a focus on the Texas and UK cases, based on study of over 150 government, non-profit, academic and media reports, and participation in two panels on the freeze blackout at the University of Texas -Rio Grande Valley.  I draw on other research, including ethnographies on earlier energy crises in Puerto Rico and Greece (Smith-Nonini 2020a, 2020b), to sketch out common patterns and implications for a green transition. 

The Matrix of our Bodies Electric   

The multiple factors behind these crises attest to the complex nature of the grid – simultaneously an aging mechanical infrastructure and cultural artifact, shaped by specific histories and geographies (Bakke 2017) amid a volatile capitalist industrial ecology of fuel flows, climate change, growing inequality and new risks of contagion.

Blackouts often result from the convergence of unusual weather, poor regulation and incentives that reward profit-seeking at the expense of grid maintenance or equitable rates. Prolonged grid breakdowns contribute to energy poverty, or lack of access to energy, which affects 25% of humanity and is both a cause and result of “underdevelopment.”(Sovocool and Dworkin 2014).

But recent energy crises highlight “new energy poverty” in industrialized countries. Most low-income US families qualify as energy poor (i.e., over 10% of incomes spent on utilities) (Mohr 2018), while over 50 million Europeans struggle to pay utility bills – especially in the UK, Eastern Europe, and Mediterranean area (Bouzarovski 2014).

Grid fragility has been exacerbated since the 1990s by pressures to break up and privatize profitable assets of public utilities, a trend associated with rate increases, service cuts, and increased utility debt, especially in indebted countries where privatization is a condition of loan agreements and utility regulation is often weak (Luke 2010, Palast et. al 2003).  

Nearly ubiquitous access to electricity in wealthy countries obscures the magnitude of fossil fuel dependence that underwrites modernity.  Hurricane María’s 2017 destruction of Puerto Rico’s grid plunged residents into the worst blackout in US history. “The country was upside down,” a local activist observed, noting that while power is not considered a basic need like water, “people cannot afford to be in this society — a high energy society — without electricity” (Smith-Nonini 2020a).  

The storm laid bare electricity’s role as routine conduit for basic needs. Around 3000 people died, including many reliant on power for medical therapies. A million lost water service. Residents stood in long lines for food, which grew scarce, and had to survive for weeks with cash on hand for lack of bank machines (Smith-Nonini 2020a).

Inside Pandemic-related Energy Crises

The February 2021 Texas Freeze Blackout 

The Texas freeze caused over 700 deaths and blacked out 4.5 million households. COVID patients could not access care and stores ran out of food. Republican Governor Greg Abbot blamed frozen windmills, but had to walk this back once it was clear that frozen gas lines supplying power plants caused 55% of the outages. The news was a shock to this petro-“state” where fracked gas and oil are credited with restoring US global economic clout since the 2008 financial crisis.  

A failure to weatherize the grid was widely blamed for the debacle. Unlike some islands (e.g., Puerto Rico) that lack options for grid sharing to shore up reliability, Texan politicians voluntarily isolated their grid from other states after an earlier 2011 freeze to evade federal weatherization rules (Busby, et al. 2021). Two cold snaps in early 2022 that reduced gas flow highlighted the fact that weatherization of gas lines remains only partially completed.

During the 2021 freeze, administrators of the largely deregulated grid marked up the wholesale electricity price to $9,000 per MWh (vs. a $22 per MWh average in 2020) in a failed bid to incentivize more gas production. This led to an estimated $50 billion in charges over five days to energy retailers and ratepayers, causing many suppliers to incur large debts and bankrupting three utilities.  Meanwhile, other energy generators and suppliers with “variable contracts” earned billions because they were allowed to pass the astronomical rates to ratepayers, most of them unaware they could be hit with a monthly bill of $10,000 or more due to factors outside their control (Busby, et. al 2021).

Rather than cancel what some would call “odious debt,” Republican state legislators later socialized the debt, offering long-term payment plans to customers and issuing state-backed bonds for $7 billion in low-cost loans to impacted energy companies. Many lawsuits remain pending. One involves Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), a large gas company that earned $2.5 billion during the storm, and later contributed $1 million to Gov.  Abbott’s campaign chest. $300 million of ETP’s profits were billed to San Antonio’s municipal utility, whose residents now face a surcharge to cover the tab. The city has sued ETP.  

Overall, gas companies took home $11 billion; other winners in the Texas “power pool” included speculators—banks and energy trading companies—which placed lucrative bids on prices while Texans burned furniture to stay warm, but had no role in actually supplying energy. 

The 2021 British (and European) Energy Crisis

In October, a five-fold rise in natural gas prices in Europe, along with a drop in wind power and Brexit complications, led to steep price hikes for British wholesale electricity and warnings from National Grid, the system’s corporate operator, of possible winter power cuts. The inflation was linked to shortages of Liquified Natural Gas (LNG), in part from ramped up Chinese demand, and speculation over geopolitical tensions, given the EU’s heavy reliance on Russian gas. UK electricity is 40% dependent on gas, roughly double the level for the EU.  

Regulators raised the UK public cap on electric rates by 12%, and it goes up another 54% in April, the largest cost of living increase in a quarter century.  An early 2022 government aid package will offset costs for low-income families, and allow extended payments, but regulators warn the cap may rise further. An astounding 29 utilities (mostly small, poorly vetted retailers) in the UK’s “power pool,” went bankrupt since the cap forced them to absorb extra costs, leaving millions of ratepayers without service. One large utility, Bulb, was bailed out by the government, which failed to take wider action. Meanwhile, North Sea oil and gas firms, long-term heavy donors to Tory politicians, took home windfall profits, leading to calls for new taxes on the sector.

Ironically, after long delays on renewables, in 2019 the UK had expanded wind power to a remarkable 28% share of electric power, but a rare calm weakened the turbines’ output in mid-2021.  Also, a fire in a trans-channel electric cable and new Brexit rules disrupted a promising system of cross-border undersea cables aimed at mitigating supply shortfalls.  

Competition with China over LNG gas helped drive prices up. China had phased down coal due to an economic slump, climate goals and Olympic optics, but encountered an energy shortage as demand ramped up in the fall. To compensate, officials reversed a Trump-era ban on US gas imports and Sinopec signed long term contracts for LNG offering higher prices than EU importers, which diverted many LNG tankers to Asia.  

Prices peaked in Europe at a record 171.40 euros/MWh just before Christmas due to tensions over lower-than-normal Russian gas flow to Europe and the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. They moderated, then soared again in late February as Russia invaded Ukraine.

Patterns of Grid Fragility behind Energy Crises

Extreme weather was a factor in many 2021 crises – deadly storms, shifting winds, and Asian floods (which cut coal production). Also, rapid growth in electricity demand year over year (e.g. video streaming, Bitcoin mining) has put pressure on power plants, feeding a narrative from conservatives and business critics that the green transition is the problem, and more gas plants the solution. 

But many crises have deeper roots. Since the 1980s, 18 US states and over 35 countries, (including the UK and much of the EU), have partly or fully deregulated electricity. Neoliberal policies favoring such “unbundling” have resulted in privatization of profitable assets, widespread layoffs of utility workforces and neglect of grid maintenance (often left to state authorities). The reforms enabled renewable energy on the grid, and promised lower rates, but hurt public oversight (Oppenheim 2016), while favoring extraction of profits and speculation through energy trading. California’s 2000 Enron debacle, Puerto Rico’s 2021 grid failure after a hasty privatization, steeply priced electricity in Central and Eastern Europe –where energy poverty is high — (Bouzarovski 2014) and are examples of deregulation’s downsides.

In many places, including the UK and Texas, large corporate players dominated the deregulation process, precluding actual competition and setting the stage for steep consumer fees and rates that outweigh earlier cuts in rates. This corporate control enabled the 2021 price gouging of Texas and UK ratepayers and the string of British utility bankruptcies.

During earlier energy crises in Greece and Puerto Rico, steep price hikes for electricity tied to austerity over public debt, left many consumers unable to pay bills, with some turning to energy theft (an option aided by organized anti-debt advocates in Greece). Loss of revenues fed back on public utilities causing institutional debt and providing a rationale for privatizations that benefitted hedge funds and foreign investors more than ratepayers (Smith-Nonini 2020a, 2020b).   

These energy crises expose the socio-material path dependency embedded in grid infrastructures which creates friction, slowing green transitions, while creating scalar vulnerabilities to disruption that are difficult to predict and have complex repercussions (Boyer 2017).  A key question is whether the 2021 crises are short-term, or evidence of a long-term mismatch between supply and demand rooted in resource limits intertwined with capitalist contradictions.

Notably, growth in conventional global oil/gas production has been tepid since 2005, and unconventional extraction (e.g. fracking and deep-sea drilling) is not profitable without high debt and large state subsidies. Also, volatile energy markets often fail to satisfy both consumer needs for affordability and corporate needs for growth, provoking new crises.

In late 2021 the International Energy Agency reported that growth in renewables won’t supplant fossil fuels in time to keep global heating below 1.5°C, and the gap – as electric grids expand and fossil energy is phased out (or loses profitability) — will feed destructive cycles of volatility in markets for energy and energy-intensive goods, including food. The current spike in natural gas prices has driven up fertilizer costs, which is likely to exacerbate regional food crises.  

An understudied problem is how divestment and pandemic capital destruction will affect the green transition. Can energy crises stimulate degrowth innovations?  Might fledgling movements for community solar (e.g., as exist in Cuba, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico) help solve energy poverty and climate goals at the same time?    

But scaling up, for society to transition we need stable grids. As an environmental advocate once told me, “We need to burn some fossil fuels to get to where we don’t need to.” If electricity is to be the centerpiece of a renewable future, we have much work to do. We should start by demanding accountable public oversight of electric systems.

Sandy Smith-Nonini is a research assistant professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She produced “Dis.em.POWER.ed: Puerto Rico’s Perfect Storm,” a film on the causes of the longest blackout in US history, and is the author of Healing the Body Politic .  

References

Bakke, Gretchen. 2017. The Grid: The Fraying Wires between Americans and Our Energy Future. Bloomsbury.

Boyer, Dominic. 2017. “Revolutionary Infrastructures” Infrastructures and Social Complexity, eds: P. Harvey, et. al.  CRESC.

Bouzarovski, Stefan 2014 “Energy poverty in the European Union: landscapes of vulnerability.” WIREs Energy and Environment 2014, 3: 276–289.

Busby, Joshua W. et al. 2021 “Cascading risks: Understanding the 2021 winter blackout in Texas.” Energy Research & Social Science, 77: 102-106.

Luke, Timothy. 2010. Power Loss or Blackout: The Electricity Network Collapse of August 2003 in North America, 55-68, in Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructure Fails, ed. S. Graham, Routledge.

Mohr, Tanga M. 2018. “Fuel poverty in the US: Evidence using the 2009 Residential Energy Consumption Survey.” Energy Economics 74: 360–369.

Oppenheim, Jerrold 2018. “The United States regulatory compact and energy poverty.” Energy Research & Social Science 18 (2016) 96–108.

Palast, Greg et. al. 2003. Democracy and Regulation: How the Public Can Govern Essential Services. Pluto Press.

Smith-Nonini, Sandy. 2020a. “The Debt/Energy Nexus behind Puerto Rico’s Long Blackout: From Fossil Colonialism to ‘New’ Energy Poverty.” Latin American Perspectives 232: 47(3): 64–86.

Smith-Nonini, Sandy. 2020b. “Networked Flows through a ‘Porous’ State: A Scalar Energo-political Analysis of the Greek Debt Crisis”, in The Tumultuous Politics of Scale, eds: D. Nonini and I. Susser, Routledge Press.

Sovocool, Benjamin and M. Dworkin. 2014. Global Energy Justice: Problems, Principles, and Practices. Cambridge University Press.

Cite as: Smith-Nonini, Sandy. 2022. “Energy Crises in the Time of Covid: Precarious Fossil Infrastructures.” FocaalBlog, 21 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/21/sandy-smith-nonini-energy-crises-in-the-time-of-covid-precarious-fossil-infrastructures

Blog

Dimitris Dalakoglou, Georgos Poulimenakos: The Past is on Fire: Wildfires, (Un)imagined Communities and the Shift to the Tourism of the 1%

In Greece, during the summer of 2021, we saw again a proliferation of wildfires that went on for days, like in 2020. While the climate change argument makes sense, at the same time Greece has experienced wildfires for many decades now. In the post-dictatorial Greek popular imaginary, fire represents the creative destruction process of a violent disjunctive modernization, led by a quasi-illicit capitalism based on the construction boom. Across Greece, one can hear stories about great wildfires that flattened forests and green mountainsides only to see villas, casinos and tourist resorts growing in their place some years later. Tied to the monolithic emphasis on an economic growth strategy based almost entirely on tourist services, wildfires over the last decades have facilitated the expansion of tourist infrastructures and the built environment. The systematic exploitation of gray areas (parathirakia/παραθυράκια) in Greek environmental law and urban planning law have facilitated these opportunities (see Dalakoglou and Kallianos 2019). Factual or not, such arguments have been enhanced during the recent wildfires, as many informants of the infra-demos project are noticing that during the early years of the financial crisis (2010-2016) when real estate, tourism and infrastructures investment saw a drop, one also witnessed a noticeable decrease in wildfires, for the first time in decades. Although we cannot confirm such datasets on wildfires, if one takes as case study the ways that the state protects archaeological sites from wildfires and other risks, there is arguably an implied link with specific shifts in the Greek state’s touristic growth strategies.

Antiquities on Fire

In one of these usual wildfires in August 2020, some shocking news came to the attention of the Greek public. The famous Lion Gate of Mycenae, erected in 1250 BC, was set ablaze as the Greek civil protection agencies failed to protect it from a wildfire that had flared up in the area. The Greek government downplayed the issue, stating that no real damage had been done. Many local informants of Poulimenakos claimed that during the previous years there had been fire-brigade forces near the site for its protection, but they were not present that summer.

In August 2021, Greece faced perhaps the most destructive wave of wildfires in its recent history, with more than a million acres of forest turned into ashes. During this wave, the archaeological site of ancient Olympia in Peloponnese was almost eradicated, with people on the site talking about the pure luck in the guise of a change in the wind direction, which ultimately prevented that catastrophe. The official policy of the Greek state was to evacuate the area and protect human lives, with saving the forest or the archeological sites seen as less of a priority. A few weeks earlier, the most important archaeological site in the Attica region outside the Athens metropolis, Poseidon Temple in Sounio, saw a wildfire next to the monument. It was extinguished thanks to its proximity to the town of Lavrio, where sizeable forces of fire brigades are stationed, yet many locals mention to Dalakoglou that if it was not for the five-star hotel that was between the ancient temple and the fire, they would not have saved it in time. Another wildfire entered the national park of Sounio later in August 2021.

Figure 1: Remains of fire 1km away from the ancient temple of Sounio (on the background). Photo: D. Dalakoglou.

The Archaeology of Greece 2.0

Earlier in 2021, the Ministry of Culture caused outrage among archaeologists of the country with its actions. To mention a few, a large public construction project was carried out in the Acropolis of Athens to create a large concrete walkway, which was built near the monument during the lockdown. Many compared the construction to a fashion show stage. And the truth is that a few months later, a luxury clothing brand arranged a show on the new cement corridor with the Parthenon as the background for the videos and photos. A few weeks later, Sounio was booked by the same brand for another fashion show. The indifference that the current Ministry of Culture has shown towards ancient sites has other facets. For example, in the summer of 2021, the Minister announced that the entire Byzantine high street in Thessaloniki that was discovered during the public works for the construction of Thessaloniki metro will be removed. The Minister, an archeologist herself, would not consider the proposals to exhibit and integrate the findings within the metro infrastructure, which was promoted by various archaeology associations. The promise that 92% of the site will be reconstructed on the site after the works for the metro are completed did not convince the archaeologists. The metro and the gentrification it will bring to various parts of the city were more important priorities than the findings, which are significant even for a nation with as much archaeological wealth as Greece.

Figure 2: The announcement that the Sounio temple will not be open to the public due to the photoshoot. Photo: D. Dalakoglou.
Figure 3: The Acropolis after the cement walkway was built. Photo: D. Dalakoglou.

“Greece 2.0” was what Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, leader of the neoliberal New Democracy party, named the country’s post-covid recovery plan. Greece 2.0 suggests a plan oriented to all-inclusive hotels, casinos and hip new neighborhoods, signifying a shift to a new tourism model to appeal to different kinds of customers. The city branding and the emphasis on this new type of tourism has been going on for some years now at the behest of Greek tourism policymakers, targeting so-called “high quality” tourists with big wallets. These new categories of tourists are expected to be rich enough to buy cheap metropolitan properties to rent out on airbnb when they are not staying there, thus gentrifying the cities, or to afford the high prices of 5-star tourist accommodation. To put it simplistically, there seems to be a transition from the stereotypical history-aware tourist in socks and sandals wandering around the acropolis, to new categories, with little interest in archaeology (e.g. Western yuppies, Arab sheikhs, Russian oligarchs, and upper classes from emerging economies).

Before the pandemic, there was a widely held idea that Greek tourism is no longer affordable for Greeks and is thus only open to foreigners. The drop in the real income of many Greeks since the crisis of 2010 and the unaffordability, for most Greeks, of tourist products, especially accommodation, has caused this gap. To put it simply, until the early 2010s, there was expensive luxurious accommodation in the islands of Greece, but it was not rare to also find local small units with a cost of 40-50 EUR per night, even in the high session. Today, however, such prices are nothing but a fantasy for many millions of Greeks, who have seen a decrease in their income since 2010. Many people in Greece wait for the state-sponsored ‘social tourism vouchers’ in order to get a few days in one of the many touristic destinations of the country. Yet this affects international tourism too, as the Greek tourist product is addressed increasingly to wealthier classes who look for five-star tourist experiences.

The Resetting of Popular Greekness

As the anthropological preoccupation with infrastructures has taught us, things like social and cultural identities, the relation between the state and its citizenry, and even ideology itself, are not abstract, immaterial ideas installed in the hearts and minds of the people. A very concrete, material basis that shapes particular socio-cultural environments is a prerequisite for social contracts and imagined communities to be shaped. The archeological sites in Greece served in many ways as such infrastructures, as they secured the ideological and, in many instances, also the economic integration of an emerging Greek middle class. As many people (not just the wealthy elites) were profiting from the commodification of the national identity within the touristic industry. Restaurants, hotels, stores selling souvenirs, local and international tour operators, guides, airports, and port infrastructures all relied to a great extent on that same materiality. The creative imagination often has depicted with humor the image of the Greek islander holding a ‘rooms to let’ sign in the port of their island, with museums and archaeological sites having a significant role in this industry. Much of the material basis of the national identity was simultaneously the main axis of the touristic industry.

Of course, Greece is not the only polity that is abandoning its archeological infrastructures and by extension abandoning a classic liberal need for a minimum of social cohesion based on a common sociocultural identity. The destruction of the Notre Dame in Paris some years ago, with the French state failing to secure one of the most acknowledged material symbols of the continent, marked probably the end of the western need to produce relations and continuities with a timeline and a purpose that make sense.

What can this seeming abandonment of a certain kind of archaeological tourism infrastructure tell us about Greece today? As the neoliberal model deepens, the tourist industry is “liberated” from the need to link with a collective identity. This identity traditionally functioned by economically and socio-culturally integrating the lower classes inside Greece, and by addressing mass tourism outside. As this link was inextricably connected with certain material infrastructures, the indifference towards them signifies an era in which the tourist model, and perhaps the very structure of Greek society, will no longer be based on gaining consensus from the lower strata, but in aggressively serving the 1%.

The neoliberal management of the world is sending collective identities and the sense of history or geography into a state of limbo. The aesthetics of a 5-star all-inclusive hotel on a beachfront are almost context-free, a tourist could be pretty much in any of the 5 continents, and in any recent decade, and have a very similar, if not the same, experience. Similarly, the aesthetics of a New York loft, which preoccupies much of the renovation for airbnb purposes in apartments in downtown Athens (even quoting ‘New York style loft’ in the airbnb ad), could be almost anywhere else in the Americas or Europe. What is needed for neoliberalism is a culture of the present expressed in constant transactions. Everything else can be surrendered to the merciless critique of entropy.

Dimitris Dalakoglou is Professor of Social Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is director and PI of the research project infra-demos (funded from NWO-Vidi grant) and co-director of the Lab on Infrastructures Sustainability and the Commons.

Giorgos Poulimenakos holds a Bachelor’s degree in Social Anthropology from Panteion University and a MA from University of Sussex, UK. He is currently a PhD fellow in the ERC-funded project PORTS, based in the department of social anthropology of the University of Oslo. He will be researching the increasing significance of ports and maritime logistics in globalized, contemporary capitalism through the case study of Piraeus, an emerging Greek port in the global market bought recently by Chinese interests.

References

infrademos.net

Dalakoglou, D., & Kallianos, Y. (2018). ‘Eating mountains’ and ‘eating each other’: Disjunctive modernization, infrastructural imaginaries and crisis in Greece. Political Geography, 67, 76-87.

Poulimenakos G. & Dalakoglou D. (2018). Airbnbizing Europe: mobility, property and platform capitalism. Online publication or Website, Open Democracy

Cite as: Dalakoglou, Dimitris and Georgos Poulimenakos. 2021. “The Past is on Fire: Wildfires, (Un)imagined Communities and the Shift to the Tourism of the 1%.” FocaalBlog, 30 September. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/09/30/dimitris-dalakoglou-georgos-poulimenakos-the-past-is-on-fire/

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/

Features, The Political Power of Energy Futures

Katja Müller, Charlotte Bruckermann, Kirsten W. Endres: Introduction: The political power of energy futures

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).

Debates about climate change have long entered political arenas through diplomacy, bureaucracy and regulations as part of worldwide environmental governance. Global efforts to foster greener energy increasingly supplement resource extractivism (IEA 2019). Yet, unfolding protests, from Fridays for Future to Extinction Rebellion, point to the insufficiencies of current measures. As lawsuits threaten the European mega-corporation RWE Energy with the responsibility for glacial melting in the Andes and Sioux sit-ins block the Dakota Access Pipeline in the USA, direct political action is on the rise to fight climate change by transforming energy infrastructure. Social anthropology’s analytical thrust to treat energy systems as sociotechnical constructs urgently needs to challenge the depoliticizing tendency inherent to energy decision-making (Boyer 2019, Howe 2019).

Photo of protest crowd holding signs.
Image 1. Fridays for Future Cologne, Germany 2019. Photo by Charlotte Bruckermann

In particular, narratives of incremental improvement based on efficiency, productivity, and development discourse, must be re-examined in of the urgent need for renewable energy generation (Franquesa 2018, Gupta 2015). At the same time, political turmoil accompanies many renewable energy projects. These range from protests against involuntary displacement and the destruction of ecosystems by hydropower megaprojects like the Chinese Three Gorges dam to sovereignty struggles over Bolivian lithium reserves used in the production of solar batteries to the Spanish governments’ recent decision to hand over wind turbine development to big energy players. Beyond doom and gloom, energy’s production, distribution and consumption rise and fall with technological innovation (Winther 2013, Günel 2019). Our imagination of what makes human life easier and what improves living conditions for societies shapes the technologies we come up with and how we put them to use.

Photo of very tall tree in a forest with a treehouse built near the top.
Image 2. Treehouse with solar panel on the forest edge of RWE’s Hambach coal mine in protest of surface mine expansion, Germany 2019. Photo by Charlotte Bruckermann

Over the last decades, anthropology and other academic disciplines have shown that energy systems are interdependent webs of sociotechnical and sociomaterial connections (Boyer 2014; Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014; Gupta 2015; Appel 2015). They are enmeshed in geographical conditions, spatial identities, traditions, norms and imaginaries as well as in political negotiations and financial assessments (Günel 2019; Moss 2020; Mitchell 2011; Bakke 2016). These assessments and negotiations have often privileged not only one energy technology over another, but one community’s or stakeholder’s future over another (Powell 2018). This grave inequality has led the critical social sciences to question what energy futures entail, how much adaptations are necessary or possible, what we can sacrifice for particular energy scenarios, and to ask who exploits what instruments of power to what particular ends (Smith and High 2017).  

The contributions to this FocaalBlog feature discuss the political legitimacies and forms of power that become possible through renewables’ development and the greening of energy systems. Indeed, the development of renewable energy sources begs questions with high stakes: How does political decision-making on energy sources unfold, including expanding resource extraction, extending the grid, or developing renewables? How do historic injustices and exclusionary legacies of extraction, production and consumption affect future energy horizons? Do imperatives for greening energy create new role models in energy matters that shift the focus within and beyond the dichotomy of “the West and the Rest”? When do debates about local environmental priorities and energy rights undermine or bolster global climate targets? Which new forms of precarity and scarcity do large-scale infrastructural impositions by local or international powerholders entail?

Based on a panel at the 16th EASA Biennial Conference virtually held in Lisbon in July 2020, this collection of papers investigates the contradictions and contestations between the persistence of conventional energy systems and the rise of renewables within the complex operations of political power that affect our anticipated energy futures. From top-down policymaking regarding energy access to grassroots calls for climate justice, the contributions interrogate the policies and politics surrounding renewable energy, and the unintended consequences and alliances in its delivery.

Rethinking energy futures

After decades of constant growth in energy production and demand, climate change is no longer an abstract threat. We are therefore forced to scrutinize established foundations of energy systems. While energy research has already expanded the view from the misperception of localised, insulated extractivism to that industry’s real-world global conditions, climate change forces us to rethink our energy future on all levels.

Formerly the elephant in the room, all too often ignored in energy action, climate change increasingly factors into decisions on changing energy systems large and small. At least, this is reflected in the figures: In 2019, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), global energy-related CO2 emissions flattened (slightly) at around 33 gigatons, resulting mainly from a sharp decline in CO2 emissions from the power sector in advanced economies (IEA 2020). This flattening is the result of the expanding role of renewable sources (mainly wind and solar photovoltaic), of fuel switching from coal to gas, and results from higher nuclear power output.

We need to expand our understanding of energy systems beyond sociotechnical systems to socio-ecological horizons. In his Capitalism and the Web of Life, Jason Moore (2015) proposes that the separation of humans and nature resulted in the exploitation of “Cheap Nature”, exacerbating resource use in excess of sustainability several fold. This extensive extractivism then fuelled the rise of capitalism, supporting financial systems that rest on exploitation of both minority societies and the interrelated human-nature-complex. Many energy systems, regardless of their sustainability status, threaten global living conditions and operate by privatizing profits and socializing risks and losses. Critical understanding of conventional energy systems and creative approaches to potential energy futures therefore require both intellectual and political engagement.

Photo of electrical chords tangled together near the side of a building
Image 3. A squirrel scurries across entangled electricity cables in Hanoi, Vietnam. Photo by Kirsten W. Endres, 2019

Bridging different scales of inequality and extraction, the blog contributors challenge the undemocratic and unequal ways of owning and producing energy. They question the financial assessments of energy production that ignore or miscalculate environmental and climate effects. However, as anthropologists, they also direct our attention to the human experiences and personal pathways forged through engagement with energy futures. Their case studies affirm that obligations rather than incentives are needed to make green technologies work for all and to reduce energy consumption. Cash cows of energy production within established political and market systems too often fail to provide just and sustainable energy systems.

Thinking of our energy future, CO2 emission developments indicate that socioecological considerations are gaining weight in energy debates and practice, as they flattened after reaching a historical height (IEA 2020). However, these shifts are not yet substantial enough to outpace political powers that focus on the economic or technological dimensions of energy production systems only. Time and again, official statements from politicians and others claim that faster or more consequential shifts to renewable energy are not feasible, thus revealing a reticence to realize sustainable energy futures. Arguments abound that energy networks and electrification need (fossil fuel based) development, or that they require at least bridging technologies to guarantee cheap and reliable supply of sufficient energy. In parallel, quarrels that a technology is not mature or marketable enough break out alongside complaints that solar energy was too expensive to survive on the market. Fears of economic losses, of declining voter favour or of structural change prevent energy transitions that are socioecological in nature and backed by sociopolitics (Sovacool 2016).

Photo of stage with empty chairs and vertical green bars on the screen behind.
Image 4. Joint launch of Green Bond Index between the Luxembourg und Shenzhen Stock Exchange in Beijing, People’s Republic of China 2017. Photo by Charlotte Bruckermann

To accomplish energy transitions, voluntary obligations of private companies are not sufficient. Such obligations have hardly ever led to improvements of community goods, especially not if cutting profits was a necessity. The voiced by non-corporate stakeholders need to be heard and implemented through legally binding rules. Climate, nature and the planet cannot speak for themselves, but require a socioecological understanding of energy systems to be the basis for energy decision making. This does not imply that we can solve the climate dialectic (Goodman 2016). A socioecological energy system concept will not allow for a sudden political regulation of the climate crisis through regulating energy production. Yet, understanding the political powers at play in energy systems is essential so as to not become paralyzed and to retain instead agency in times of severe crisis: energy futures need to be envisioned, power mechanisms understood and analysed. The papers of this special issues contribute to this endeavour.

Photo of power lines running through transmission tower, taken looking up from below.
Image 5. Power lines shaping current and future energy systems, Germany 2021, photo by C. Schulze

Ethnographic inquiries into energy futures

Our blog contributions take the reader to a variety of geographical settings and socio-political environments. Felix Lussem’s contribution explores the contemporary entanglement of political institutions and the energy industry in Germany’s lignite mining Rhineland, a region with a long history of large-scale resource extraction. As Lussem shows, this entanglement finds its most obvious expression in the practice of “creating facts” in order to (continue) providing cheap energy from the fossil fuel, while activists and other civil society actors try to prevent further damage to their environment and demand greater public participation in designing pathways towards a sustainable energy transition in the region.

Calls for an accelerated transition to climate-friendlier and cleaner energy sources have also gained momentum on the African continent. Some of the pitfalls and challenges of implementing green energy policies at the national/local level become apparent in Pauline Destree’s contribution. Rather than belonging to the future, renewables (such as hydropower) have dominated Ghana’s power sector in the past, while recent oil discoveries have spurred an increased rush for fossil fuel exploitation. Concomitantly, corporate solar investments gained salience during an energy crisis that hit the country in 2015. As Destree demonstrates, this led to a “renewable divide” in urban areas. While a few “green enclaves” benefit from their installed renewables, the financial situation of national utilities has worsened, resulting in higher tariffs for urban residents who continue to depend on the national grid. 

Dragan Djunda’s contribution takes us to the Western Balkans, where small hydropower plants (SHPPs) have recently emerged as a dominant strategy for reducing fossil fuel dependency. This double transformation path to renewable energy and liberalisation of the energy sector as an adaptation to EU standards attracted large flows of foreign investment. But the damming of the last remaining free-flowing rivers in Europe has sparked its own protests, as the selling of SHPPs licences implies the ‘sell-off’ of locally used water and of pristine environs.  In the Stara Mountain region in south-eastern Serbia environmental activists and local residents successfully defended rivers and villages against the impending damage from hydropower development in the region. As an unexpected outcome of the conflicts and contestations, the formerly decaying villages suddenly attracted increased touristic attention as well as financial support for community-relevant infrastructure projects.

In northern Portugal, structural reforms and austerity measures imposed by EU institutions to battle the country’s financial crisis have contributed to another path in renewable energy transition, a path that forges links into the global green bond market. Giulia Dal Maso’s contribution traces the history and location of wind farms in the wine-producing Viseu region that had been refinanced by the first Chinese green bond issued in Europe. Whereas the bond-issuing Chinese enterprise has since been able to extract rent from a previously public infrastructure, this refinancing did not produce any “extra good” for local people in the Viseu region, who keep struggling to pay their electricity bills.

From industrialized regions facing their own coal dependency and growing holes in landscapes of extraction in the German Rheinland to a Ghanaian balancing act between weathered dams for hydropower, new oil and gas discoveries, and the mushrooming of privileged green enclaves, from regional resistance to damming up the rivers of the Balkan mountains to residents in rural Portugal finding themselves poised between local pride in their wind and the pressure of paying for its energy delivery by a Chinese investor: What the contributions to this blog feature show is that pathways towards a renewable energy future are not straight-forward or unilineal, and global players in renewables finance usurp local infrastructures and drive their agendas forward, albeit being consistently challenged and scrutinised by more local imaginations of a sustainable future.

Beyond a focus on energy experts and policy pragmatists balancing public utilities and personal consumption as a calculative endeavour, anthropological investigations show how every energy provision relies on common resources and reshapes shared landscapes. Big players in energy production wield finance and power in ways that may undermine or further political and personal futures, and lead to surprising twists and turns in energy narratives. Yet suturing scales of energy engagement between corporate hierarchies, different state levels, and local energy producers and consumers, reveal that decisions on the form and type of energy used reach into deep historical experiences of developmentalist projects. Tracing the entangled relationships between people forging their energy horizons and reflecting on their demands and obligations to each other, brings to light their commitment to a collective future.

Katja Müller works as a social anthropologist at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Regional Studies, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and at the University of Technology Sydney. She conducts research on energy transitions, mining and climate change, as well as on digital cultural heritage.

Charlotte Bruckermann explores carbon as a frontline of value in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. Her current research focuses on carbon management in the creation of Chinese ecological civilization, with a focus on carbon offset forests, digital carbon accounting, and the decarbonization of everyday life in a coal region. Her book Claiming Homes was published in 2019.

Kirsten W. Endres is Head of Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, Germany. Her current project focuses on the interrelationship between the development of energy systems and the complex operation of modern states and state power in the Greater Mekong Subregion.

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Cite as: Müller, Katja, Charlotte Bruckermann, Kirsten W. Endres. 2021. “Introduction: The political power of energy futures.” FocaalBlog, 7 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/07/katja-muller-charlotte-bruckermann-kirsten-endres-introduction-the-political-power-of-energy-futures/