Sub-theme 6. The drama of the grabbed commons
Panel 6.7.
Energy in Common? Challenges and Reactions to Energy Infrastructure Projects
The push to transition to renewable sources of energy has been met by calls to invest in energy production projects and distribution infrastructures. From offshore wind farms to utility-scale solar installations, these projects and the infrastructures needed to support them require vast quantities of land, sea, and material resources. Some scholars have referred to the sites where these projects and infrastructures are located, or planned to be located, as ‘sacrifice zones’ because of the disproportionate impact they have on nearby ecologies and communities. In many cases, these sacrifice zones have been shown to adversely affect poor and marginalised communities, sacred lands, and sensitive ecosystems, but are justified in the name of national and transnational net zero targets and combating climate change. In other cases, citizen-led renewable energy alternatives have shown how projects and infrastructures can bolster local wellbeing, empower communities, and account for local ecologies.
This panel asks: how do renewable energy projects and infrastructures cultivate and undermine local and regional social solidarities? What visions, hopes, and anxieties do they evoke among people in near by communities? How do these projects and infrastructures reproduce or disrupt inequalities along the axis’s of gender, race, class, and region? And, why, and to what degree, do they evoke aspirations for new common spatial arrangements and shared futures?
This panel warmly invites papers from across disciplines that addresses one or more of these questions.
1. What makes local energy projects acceptable? Probing the connection between ownership structures and community acceptance (in-person)
University of St Andrews, United Kingdom
Community ownership of wind energy has been found to increase acceptance, but the reasons for this are poorly understood. Here, we compare different communities’ attitudes towards local onshore wind energy projects in order to gain a deeper understanding of the characteristics of ownership which are conducive to community acceptance. Using a postal survey in Scotland (n = 318), we compared three communities with varying degrees of ownership regarding their (1) support for the local wind project; (2) perceptions of energy justice; (3) perceived impacts; and (4) ownership and benefit preferences. One-way ANOVAs and the Potential for Conflict Index2 identified that residents in the two communities with a degree of ownership were more associated with greater acceptance, processes, and outcomes (i.e. more just and inclusive development processes and more fairly distributed benefits and impacts), than residents living near the privately-owned development. Additionally, we provide evidence that a co-operative can achieve similar acceptance and energy justice as a fully community-owned project. Overall, the results indicate that policymakers should take seriously the connection between the tenets of energy justice and ownership models in their policy and planning efforts.
2. Renewables for occupation: wind, solar, and the legitimization of the status quo in Western Sahara (online)
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain
In the early 2010s, the Kingdom of Morocco has launched an ambitious plan to produce over 40% of its energy from renewable energy sources. This plan, which is currently being implemented, has been supported by many international financial institutions, has allowed Morocco to improve its international status, and has earned it an affiliation to the International Energy Agency in 2016. However, part of the installations that Morocco intends to build are in the disputed territories of Western Sahara (WS), an area that Morocco occupies since 1975 against international dispositions. According to WS activists, these energy projects, in which European companies such an ENEL and Siemens are involved, threaten to legitimize Moroccan occupation, and are being characterized by non-respect of human rights, population displacements, and acts of repression by the Moroccan government. Since 1975, the Moroccan government has also implemented an Arabization policy in WS, encouraging ethnic Moroccans to move to there. That has generated conflicts at the local level, as is the misrecognition of WS population’s rights and their lack of consultation with respect to the project’s design and implementation. By collecting witnesses from activists, companies, and NGOs, and based on political ecology and energy justice theories, this paper analyzes the conflicts generated within the Western Saharan communities that have been planned to host the renewable infrastructures.
3. Commoning energy or sharing energy? Challenges and opportunities for energy citizens in Italy (in-person)
University of St Andrews, United Kingdom
Community energy promises to revolutionise our relationship with energy. They foreshadow a future in which ordinary citizens and communities take control of energy generation in ways that orient it towards their collective needs rather than those of profit-seeking companies. In 2018, the EU implemented the Renewable Energy Directive (RED II), which asks member states to introduce an enabling framework for renewable energy communities (RECs).
As other member states, Italy has recently transposed RED II into national law. To encourage the uptake of RECs, the Italian regulators introduce an incentive tariff that economically rewards ‘energy sharing’ defined as “equal to the minimum, in each hourly period, between the electricity produced and fed into the grid by renewable sources plants and the electricity taken from all the associated end customers” (Zulianello et al., 2020: 3). While some maintain that categories such as ‘energy sharing’, by defining ownership based on time, may ensure that energy is managed in common and that markets work for commons (Boekelo, 2022), others critique the EU directive’s neoliberal view for “throwing the sparrows among the cats” (i.e., small entities among powerful energy players) (Sweeney et al., 2020).
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Italy, this paper reflects on what the ‘energy commons’ can achieve within a regulated space. The paper seeks to answer the following questions. What role for citizens and communities in a decentralised energy system? What types of energy subjectivities are imagined fitting it?
4. Making space for community energy: Landed property as barrier and enabler of community energy projects (online)
1Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands, 2Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Denmark
Renewable energy infrastructures, such as wind and solar farms, require land on which they can be deployed. However, the conditions of landownership f has been widely overlooked as a powerful terrain in the field of renewables development. Yet, as we argue, the conditions of accessing, mobilising and utilising land for renewables play a key role in shaping the modes and outcomes of energy transition. In this paper, we explore the relationship between landed property and community renewable energy projects. In particular, we focus on how landed property variously influences the development modes of renewables by acting as mediator, barrier and enabler for different types of renewable energy projects. We show how this takes place through appropriation of rents in processes of assetization and value grabbing (Andreucci et al. 2017; Birch & Muniesa, 2020). The distribution of these rents can also serve to justify or undermine the legitimacy of projects in the eyes of local communities. In this way, value grabbing acts as a vital intermediary process to understand green grabbing (Alonso Serna, 2021). In doing so, we draw on insights from the Netherlands, Scotland and Germany to illuminate different mechanisms, social and historical conditions and policies through which landed property constrains or enables community energy projects. The paper finishes by sketching out some alternative ways of allocating land for the deployment of renewable energy projects, which could help shift the balance of power in favour of community energy developments.
5. Failed promises of wind power infrastructures (in-person)
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway
The attractiveness of wind energy is growing worldwide, and more and more countries decide to
scale it up. I am looking at how people perceive wind energy and its infrastructures. I am aiming to understand how their perceptions might affect the way they react to the ‘green’ projects that are being developed in the region of Galicia, in the North-West of Spain through performing on-site fieldwork as well as being engaged in virtual ethnography. With the transnational market forces dominating the policy scene – a pattern of development that is identified as globalisation-from above, led by technocratic elites, disconnected from the interests, needs and lives of the local people, the original promise of the green transition turned, for the local people, into the wind power ‘invasion’ with the energy companies steamrolling over their land and knowledge. With their landscape, becoming so contested and emerging as the main arena of energy transitions, they feel threatened to lose their way of life with such drastic restructuring of the commons. At the same time, this restructuring is bringing with it a certain infrastructural promise of economic development, green transition and clean energy. At the start, it did bring hope to the people, yet later turned out to feel like an ‘invasion’ and evoked a feeling of anxiety, distrust and, with it, the urge to resist. The failed promise of these infrastructures fostered the solidarity among the people and the wish to preserve their ‘Galician way’, to stand up and speak up for the ones that cannot speak for themselves: older generations, their forests and mountains – their land. This brings attention to a deeper split between local and global approach, as well as to local and scientific knowledge division – in the era of globalisation, some of the processes associated with energy transition might promote spatial convergence, while some might generate new patterns of uneven development.
