Geography

Utopias and dystopias of renewable energy imaginaries

Document Type

Book Chapter

Abstract

While renewable energy technologies have the potential to create more democratic energy systems, it remains uncertain whether their mass adoption will reduce or replicate social inequalities engendered through existing energy infrastructures. Using the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries, we analyze how dominant or alternative energy futures are imagined and realized. Much of the sociotechnical imaginaries literature draws on energy democracy to raise critical possibilities for cultivating alternative values, practices, and subjectivities. However, whether such alternatives become materialized or marginalized is a question of power: various material infrastructures and technologies, energy practices, and subject positions arise as a result of the ongoing co-production of energy and society. We review this literature and conclude by suggesting that alternative visions, and the performances and subjectivities they can engender, are an important starting point for understanding and materializing alternative energy futures.

Publication Title

Energy Democracies for Sustainable futures

Publication Date

2022

First Page

31

Last Page

40

ISBN

9780128227961,9780128227978

DOI

10.1016/B978-0-12-822796-1.00004-8

Keywords

energy democracy, energy transitions, power, renewable energy, sociotechnical imaginaries

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