A Prologue from the Future

It may seem bizarre, perhaps even perverse, while facing the hottest years on record, with UN Secretary-General António Guterres announcing the era of ‘global boiling’, to begin a book on one of the most urgent dilemmas of our time with a quotation from a short science-fiction story written nearly 70 years ago (Guterres Reference Guterres2023; Niranjan Reference Niranjan2023). But Isaac Asimov’s story The Last Question neatly encapsulates some of the utopian fantasies associated with the promise of renewable energy. The story begins in 2061, a year now not all that distant, and only a decade beyond the mid-century deadline which the Paris Agreement sets for the global economy to achieve net zero emissions. Two technicians, Adell and Lupov, the ‘faithful attendants’ of the giant supercomputer Multivac, sit drinking in a deserted underground chamber ruminating on Multivac’s latest achievement (Asimov Reference Asimov1956). Faced with the ever-increasing demand for energy to sustain human life on Earth and power interplanetary exploration, Multivac has designed and built a new and apparently inexhaustible energy source:

While Adell celebrates Multivac’s technological triumph – ‘all the energy we can possibly ever use for free … forever and forever and forever’ – his colleague Lupov sounds a warning note. ‘Not forever’, objects Lupov, pointing out that the ‘invisible beams of sunpower’ will only last as long as the lifespan of the Sun itself – around 10 billion years. Adell observes that this is probably long enough (‘it will last our time, won’t it?’), but as the story progresses through ‘several trillion years of human history’, we learn that Multivac’s solution has only proved temporary. Once interstellar travel became possible, what had seemed an infinite supply of energy is nowhere near enough as humans colonise space: ‘It took mankind a million years to fill one small world and then only fifteen thousand years to fill the rest of the Galaxy’. Human and non-human ingenuity and technological innovation run up against a fundamental limit: ‘the net amount of entropy of the universe’ (Asimov Reference Asimov1956: 9).

Present-Day Crisis

The fundamental limit made visible by the climate emergency is much closer to home, arising from the planetary boundaries of the biosphere, which sustains human life on Earth. These boundaries have been destabilised primarily by the burning of coal, oil, and gas, and by the hegemony of ‘fossil capital’ over the last 250 years. But as Francesco La Camera, Director-General of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), notes in his introduction to the World Energy Transitions Outlook 2023, ‘there is no time for a new energy system to evolve gradually over centuries, as was the case for the fossil fuel-based’ system (IRENA 2023: 13). According to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the total remaining carbon budget, if global heating is to be kept below 1.5°C, is no more than 400 gigatonnes (Gt) (IPCC Reference Allan2021). At present rates of annual global emissions, we will exhaust that carbon budget in less than 7 years (MRIGCCC 2021). The budget was later revised downwards, to 250 GtCO₂ as of January 2023, equal to around six years of current CO₂ emissions (Lamboll et al. Reference Lamboll, Nicholls, Smith, Kikstra, Beyers and Rogelj2023).

The IPCC, the International Energy Agency, and the Director-General of the United Nations (though apparently not the current President of the COP) are unanimous in their assessment: only a worldwide moratorium on new fossil fuel projects and a rapid and comprehensive transitioning of the world’s energy system to renewable sources can avert a catastrophic breaching of the planetary boundaries of the Earth’s climate system. According to the IEA, global renewable energy capacity must grow threefold by 2030 in order for the world to remain on a pathway to 1.5°C (IEA 2024).

Yet despite the urgency of this transition, and the need for what IRENA calls ‘profound and systemic transformation of the global energy system’, there is resistance, not only from the fossil-fuel industrial complex and its supporters in the media, institutions, and both mainstream and populist right-wing political parties, but on the ground, in the villages, places, and spaces where people encounter the expansion of renewable energy in their daily lives. Instead of embracing the promise of renewable energy, some reject it, or regard it with cynicism and mistrust. This book sets out to understand the reasons for this resistance, and the forms it takes, drawing on ethnographic case studies conducted in India, Germany, and Australia. While much of the local opposition to wind and solar farms appears to grow out of purely local concerns – who is benefiting and who is not, a lack of consultation and participation, the physical and visual impacts on local landscapes and their uses for agriculture and leisure – we argue that the deeper reasons must also be sought in the distinctive trajectory of the energy transitions we have studied, one shaped by what we call the neoliberalisation of renewable energy. In order to fully realise the promise of renewable energy, we contend, we must move beyond the neoliberal model of transition to a re-commoning of energy, one that no longer serves the pursuit of continuous economic growth.

Private Renewables – Models and Limits

The neoliberal model of transition, whose characteristics we document in the first section of the book, collides with boundaries which are not primarily the biophysical boundaries of planetary climate stability, but rather are social, political, and economic in nature. One of these is captured in an earlier report from IRENA, the 2021 World Energy Transitions Outlook: 1.5°C Pathway. The report points to an immanent potential of renewable energy: the ‘almost unlimited compression of clearing prices’ (IRENA 2021: 163). In contrast with non-renewable forms of energy such as fossil fuels, renewable energy, like the ‘invisible beams of sunpower’ in Asimov’s story, is at least potentially inexhaustible. Once the initial monetary and energy costs of building renewable energy are covered, additional electricity generation is effectively free, because unlike fossil fuels, there are no continuing fuel costs for solar and wind, only the costs of maintenance. Arguably, for the first time in human history (or at least since the publication of Asimov’s story), we are presented with the possibility of nearly free universal and inexhaustible energy. As such, renewable energy holds out the promise of energy becoming a commons, but for the authors of the 2021 IRENA report, this is a problem, rather than something to be celebrated.

The problem consists in the lack of incentives for investors. IRENA’s modelling points to the emergence of zero marginal cost for daytime electricity. But IRENA’s blueprint for delivering the energy transition, with the urgency which climate science dictates, relies on the private sector to deliver 90% of investment finance. As renewables become cheaper, however, renewable energy ceases to deliver an ‘acceptable’ return on capital in liberalised energy markets designed according to principles of marginal pricing. As IRENA puts it, ‘the more renewable energy enters the system, the lower its remuneration becomes, reducing prospects for cost recovery and paralysing new investments’ (IRENA 2021: 163). Over time, with technology leapfrogging the necessity for large-scale renewable utilities, this public–private model is unsustainable. IRENA acknowledges that the ‘misalignment’ between the uptake of renewables and the structure of liberalised energy markets will necessitate a ‘comprehensive rethinking of power system structures’ (IRENA 2021: 164).

The boundary that becomes visible here is thus a boundary created by fossil capital itself. In the fossil fuel era, as William Stanley Jevons famously observed, demand for coal actually increased, rather than declined, as technological innovation made its use as an energy source more efficient. Asimov’s story echoes the Jevons paradox in a science-fiction setting; ‘all the energy we can possibly ever use for free’, supplied by one small station orbiting the Earth, does not lead to a stabilisation of humans’ energy use, but to an expansion, as ever-more energy is required to power the colonisation of other worlds. In one sense, we are still trapped in the Jevons paradox today; global fossil fuel use continues to expand along with the rapid growth of renewable energy. Instead of renewable energy replacing coal, oil, and gas, it appears to be simply complementing them as global energy demand grows. We assume that a plentiful supply of cheap energy will underpin a ‘burgeoning global expectation of continuous economic growth, material accumulation and “progress”’ (Strauss et al. Reference Strauss, Rupp and Love2013: 11).

According to the most recent analysis by the International Energy Agency, however, the peak moment for fossil fuels may be approaching: ‘the momentum behind clean energy transitions is now sufficient for global demand for coal, oil and natural gas to all reach a high point before 2030’ (IEA 2023: 18). Under the IEA’s Stated Policies Scenario, ‘the share of coal, oil and natural gas in global energy supply – stuck for decades around 80% – starts to edge downwards and reaches 73% by 2030’ (IEA 2023: 18). Surveying the latest trends in the development of renewable energy, the IEA concludes that ‘a pathway to limiting global warming to 1.5°C is very difficult – but remains open’ (IEA 2023: 17).

More recent analysis from IRENA complements that of the International Energy Agency and offers a policy blueprint for how a ‘pathway to 1.5°C’ might be achieved. IRENA’s World Energy Transitions Outlook 2023 begins the ‘comprehensive rethinking of power system structures’ which the earlier Energy Transitions Outlook 2021 envisaged (IRENA 2021: 164). The language of these reports may appear abstract and bloodless, too far removed from the brutal realities of the floods, fires, famines, droughts, and extreme temperatures which have already killed tens of thousands of people, displaced hundreds of thousands more, killed millions of non-humans, and destroyed their habitats (Dunne Reference Dunne2023; NOAA 2023; UNDRR 2023). But they signal an emerging paradigm shift in the framing of climate and energy policy by influential international institutions: IRENA explicitly states that the energy transition must become ‘a strategic tool to foster a more equitable and inclusive world’, and calls for ‘systemic transformation’, a recognition that business as usual will not deliver the pathway to 1.5°C the world needs (IRENA 2023: 5).

The World Energy Transitions Outlook 2023 compares two scenarios: the 1.5°C Scenario, an ‘energy transition pathway aligned with the goal … to limit global average temperature increase by the end of the present century to 1.5°C’, and the Planned Energy Scenario, which ‘is based on governments’ energy plans and other planned targets and policies in place at the time of analysis’ (IRENA 2023: 17). Broadly speaking, the 1.5°C Scenario describes what needs to happen to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C; the Planned Energy Scenario describes what is actually happening. The 1.5°C Scenario requires cutting CO₂ emissions by around 37 Gt from 2022 levels and achieving net-zero emissions in the energy sector by 2050.

In order for this to happen, to give just one example, the global percentage of electricity generated from renewables must rise from the current figure of 28–68% by 2030 and 91% by 2050 (and the global percentage of electrical energy use in the total energy supply must also increase massively). In what may amount to the understatement of the century, IRENA observes that ‘the energy transition is off-track’ (IRENA 2023: 21). The gap between the 1.5°C Scenario and the Planned Energy Scenario, between what needs to happen and what the signatories to the Paris Agreement are actually doing, could best be described as a yawning chasm.

The 1.5°C pathway requires 1,000 GW of renewable power to be deployed every year from now until 2050, but in 2022, only 300 GW of renewables were added to global generation capacity. The share of renewable energy in the global energy mix must increase from 16% in 2020 to 77% by 2050 in IRENA’s 1.5°C Scenario. This is the share of renewable energy in total primary energy supply, not just electricity generation; according to the report, ‘total primary energy supply would remain stable due to increased energy efficiency and growth of renewables’ (IRENA 2023: 25). In order to achieve these goals, what IRENA describes as ‘an enduring investment gap’ must be overcome; annual investment of US$5 trillion is required; despite global investment in ‘all energy transition technologies’ reaching a record level of US$1.3 trillion in 2022, the figure must more than quadruple to remain on the 1.5°C pathway (IRENA 2023: 25).

Overall, the emissions reduction goal is to be achieved only partly by renewables and electrification (respectively, 25 and 19%); it will also rely on energy conservation and efficiency (25%), along with a combination of hydrogen, carbon storage, biofuels, and nature-based offsetting (31%) (IRENA 2023: 52). Efficiency is central: IRENA states that in 2050 total global energy consumption will need to be about 5% below 2020 levels (IRENA 2023: 48). Averaged over the period from 2023 to 2050, economic growth is expected to remain at 1.5% annually, which equates to a more than 50% increase in the size of the world economy. Business-as-usual does deliver some efficiency gains, for instance, with IEA projections suggesting that with existing policies energy consumption will grow by 25% over the period. This underlines the efficiency gap to be filled: the ambition is heroic, and at odds with experience in which energy consumption rises with rising income and falling energy prices (Diesendorf Reference Diesendorf2022).

These are only a few of the numerous gaps in current energy and climate policy which must be overcome in order for the world to move decisively from the Planned Energy Scenario to the 1.5°C Pathway Scenario. In language which echoes one of the key demands of sections of the global climate movement – ‘System change not climate change!’ (Beer Reference Beer2022) – IRENA states that a ‘profound and systemic transformation of the global energy system’ must be achieved, and with it ‘a wholescale transformation of the way societies consume and produce energy’ (IRENA 2023: 28). As the report notes, geopolitical developments, principally the war in Ukraine, have thrown up new and unforeseen barriers to such a transformation and caused governments to take retrograde steps, such as new investments in fossil fuel infrastructure (e.g. liquefied natural gas [LNG] terminals).

Despite these caveats, and the many gaps and obstacles which the World Energy Transitions Outlook identifies, IRENA argues that it is still possible to achieve a global transition to the 1.5°C pathway. Key energy transition pillars such as physical infrastructure and the skills base of populations must be strengthened and expanded, and policy and regulatory systems which IRENA says are ‘still geared toward fossil fuels’ must be redesigned to promote renewable energy and reduce emissions (IRENA 2023: 44). Perhaps most significantly, however, IRENA’s recommendations contain an implicit critique of what we describe in Chapter 2 as the neoliberalisation of the energy transition and envisage a much greater role for public provision and public intervention in securing the shift to a 1.5°C pathway. IRENA notes that from 2013 to 2020, some 75% of global investment in renewables came from the private sector; however, much of this investment has flowed to ‘the technologies and countries with the least associated risks’ (IRENA 2023: 26). Thus, according to IRENA, ‘stronger public sector intervention is required’ to bring about ‘greater geographical and technological diversity of investment’: instead of focusing on mobilising private capital, climate and energy policy should encourage ‘targeted and scaled-up public contributions’ (IRENA 2023: 26).

A New State-Centrality?

In a significant departure from the market-friendly language of its Global Renewables Outlook 2050, published just two years previously, in 2023 IRENA was advocating for a fundamental shift in the role of the state in order to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement. The 2023 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), legislated in the USA after many months of resistance from Senator Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat with strong links to the fossil fuel industry, provides striking evidence of the shift. While the IRA has many critics within the climate movement in the US, who argue that it does not go nearly far enough and makes too many concessions to the fossil fuel industry, both critics and supporters agree that the IRA is ‘the biggest piece of climate legislation’ ever passed in the United States, by a wide margin’ (Climate and Community Project 2022: 1). Although Donald Trump had threatened to repeal it if elected, the IRA represents an explicit shift away from the approach which the Obama administration attempted to legislate in 2009–2010, which would have relied on the pricing of greenhouse gas emissions and the creation of market mechanisms such as a cap-and-trade scheme to reduce emissions over the long term. By contrast, the IRA mobilises direct funding for renewable energy development and foregrounds a much greater role for direct government intervention in order to achieve the goals of US climate policy.

The IRA allocated US$369 billion to Energy Security and Climate Change programmes over 10 years (Democrats 2023). It created a framework for the US to reduce domestic greenhouse gas emissions to around 40% of 2020 levels by 2030 and to massively expand both generation and manufacturing in the renewable energy sector, giving the US a ‘competitive advantage in low-cost clean electricity and hydrogen production, infrastructure, geologic storage, and human capital’ (Meyer 2022). According to analysis from Credit Suisse, by 2029, ‘U.S. solar and wind could be the cheapest in the world at less than $5 per megawatt-hour’ (Credit Suisse 2022).

However, the Act also contains provisions which, according to analysis by researchers at the Climate and Community Project, ‘could be a huge aid in stopping the financialisation of the clean energy transition’ (ibid.). The current system of tax credits for investment in renewable energy, they argue, has become ‘a major tax shelter for private banks and Wall Street’, because project developers must go to massive banks like JP Morgan or Bank of America and try to ‘sell’ their tax break in return for funds. The IRA’s direct pay option, they maintain, ‘could unleash huge capacity in renewable energy deployment for governments, energy cooperatives, community groups, local business, and nonprofits’.

This is a conclusion broadly echoed by Bryant and Webber in their recently published Climate Finance: Taking a Position on Climate Futures. They argue that the IRA is designed to operate ‘in a partially green Keynesian manner’, steering public and private investment in such a way as to create domestic supply chains for renewable energy technology. In so doing, they suggest, the legislation seeks to bolster public support for spending on climate policy and to demonstrate ‘possibilities for doing green industrial policy through and beyond the tools of the de-risking state’ (Bryant and Webber Reference Bryant and Webber2023: 125–126). This turn to ‘green Keynesianism’, and the much greater role for the public sector and public intervention advocated by IRENA, implicitly addresses what might be termed the legitimacy gap in climate and energy policy. This ‘legitimacy gap’ is one of the central concerns of this book. To paraphrase the opening words of the popular 1970s science fiction series The Six Million Dollar Man, we have the renewable energy technology necessary to bring about a rapid decarbonisation of the global economy, but the ‘blockages to doing so are fundamentally cultural and political’ (Strauss et al. Reference Strauss, Rupp and Love2013: 10).

Major energy transitions depend, as a recent study of public participation in energy transitions concludes, on the support of major stakeholders and affected publics (Renn et al. Reference Renn, Ulmer and Deckert2020: 3). Our aim in this book is to make those stakeholders and affected publics visible, to understand their experience of transition as it unfolds around them, in the landscapes and regions in which they live, and how and why that experience might lead them to embrace or oppose it. The global trajectory of renewable energy development over the last three decades has created a perception that the energy transition is driven from above, by national states, supranational institutions, and transnational capital. The people and communities most affected by renewable energy development experience it as something happening to them, rather than with them. This perception can undermine the social legitimacy of the energy transition, and with it, broader social support for climate action.

Approach – The Book Ahead

Our approach builds on the analysis and methodology we developed in our previous book, Beyond the Coal Rush. A Turning Point for Global Energy and Climate Policy? In that book, we explored how the legitimacy of the coal-industrial complex was being challenged, both on the ground and at the level of national and transnational climate policy. We followed the contestation of coal mining in three ethnographic case studies in India, Germany, and Australia where local communities were opposing the opening up of new coal mines, or the expansion of existing mines. Based on these case studies, we argued that there was a process of articulation between these local struggles and the larger context of national and international climate policy and movements for climate action. The future of coal, we argued, and with it the future of the planet, was poised at a decisive and historic moment; the power of the coal industrial complex was beginning to unravel with the rapid shift into a new and rapidly intensifying state-renewables nexus (Goodman et al. Reference Goodman2020: xi, 232–234).

This book takes up where the previous book left off. As in the previous book, questions of legitimacy and agency are central. In the previous book, we documented how the legitimacy of the coal-industrial complex was being challenged, bridging the ‘gap between climate policy and social action at local, national, and transnational levels’ (ibd.: xii). This book employs a similar method, basing our findings on three ethnographic case studies of renewable energy development in India, Australia, and Germany. The shape of the emerging renewable energy system is the object of intense contestation in each of these countries. We approach it from the ground up, through a series of comparative case studies conducted over five years. The book delves into the intricate interplay of policy dynamics and local realities in the renewable energy transitions of Brandenburg (Germany), Karnataka (India), and South Australia. We employ a unique methodological approach, bringing together policy analysis and ethnographic research. By combining these methods, we aim to unravel the multifaceted layers of the socio-political landscape, shedding light on how renewable energy initiatives are conceived, implemented, and experienced on the ground.

The focus of our enquiry broadens beyond that of the previous book to place the local case studies in a regional context, in the new ‘energyscapes’ and ‘energy regions’ which are emerging with the expansion of wind and solar energy (Strauss et al. Reference Strauss, Rupp and Love2013: 11). We expand on the reasons for this broader regional focus in Chapter 2. It is worth reflecting for a moment on a distinctive feature of these ‘energyscapes’ which may appear obvious, but which is fundamental to the particular problems and challenges which renewable energy throws up.

People cannot live on, or in, a coal mine. As we noted in the previous book, fossil fuel extraction creates ‘sacrifice zones’ where other forms of human activity are excluded. Renewable energy, by contrast, holds out the promise of co-existence; it is possible, in theory at least, for cropping and grazing to continue on land where wind turbines are installed, and even in some limited form on solar farms. Humans can literally cohabit with solar energy – witness the widespread deployment of rooftop solar in Australia – and they may live close to wind turbines without experiencing the well-documented health effects associated with living close to a coal mine. There is scope, at least, for what two of the current authors have termed ‘social co-existence’ (Müller and Morton Reference Müller and Morton2021: 65). But as our case studies show, this co-existence is not without tension, opposition, and resistance. While the landscapes in which wind turbines and solar arrays are deployed may be perceived (especially to outsiders) to be spatially empty, uninhabited, or underutilised spaces, they are in fact spaces in which people live, earn their livelihoods, enjoy recreation, and attach value to. The social legitimacy of renewable energy is produced in these spaces, and by the people who live in them, in a process of dynamic interaction with the policies and priorities of governments and investment capital.

The role of the neoliberal state is crucial to this process. Nation states, we argue, have largely acted as handmaidens to the neoliberalisation of renewable energy, a process we explore in greater detail in Chapters 1 and 2. Thus far, the principal development model of the energy transition, one hitherto legitimised and facilitated by national governments and international institutions (such as IRENA), has been dominated by globalised energy companies building large-scale wind and solar plants, and investment funds seeking ‘sustainable’ investment opportunities and capturing the income flow from renewable energy. There is investor euphoria for renewables, for upstream ‘critical’ minerals, and for downstream ‘green’ hydrogen. As recent legal actions and investigations by media and NGOs have shown, at least some of this euphoria, and the corporate rhetoric that accompanies it, is little more than greenwashing (Carbon Market Watch 2023). On the other hand, however, the International Energy Agency’s latest World Energy Outlook predicts that renewable energy capacity is on track to increase two-and-a-half times by the end of the decade – not too far short of the goal of tripling global capacity by 2030 that governments set at the COP28 climate change conference (IEA 2024). According to the IEA, renewables will overtake coal in early 2025 to become the largest energy source for electricity generation globally; a sure sign that the global energy transition is becoming reality rather than rhetoric (IEA 2024: 15). National and regional governments are competing to attract footloose ‘green’ finance – seeking a stake in the new sunrise industries. Renewables companies rely on state regulation to facilitate new connections to the grid, to mandate the purchase of electricity from renewable sources, and to guarantee the income streams that underpin profits.

Across Chapters 3, 4, and 5 we attempt to develop a framework that can help us explain what is causing conflicts over the legitimacy of renewable energy; one that draws connections between the processes of contestation that unfold on the ground and what we term the ‘neoliberalisation’ of renewable energy, in which national states and international institutions work hand in glove with finance capital and globalised energy companies. In our analysis of on-the-ground contestation in the three case studies, we draw on a useful typology of energy conflicts developed by Becker and Naumann (Reference Becker, Naumann, Kühne and Weber2018) from their own studies of renewable energy development in Germany. Becker and Naumann’s typology can help to identify the different kinds of conflicts that may arise around new renewable energy development, what is at stake, and how different actors are drawn into local processes of contestation and deliberation. It has less explanatory power, however, to reveal why these conflicts arise; in other words, what is driving them in the first instance. We embed Becker and Naumann’s typology in an analysis drawn from political economy. As we argue in more detail in Chapter 1, the current and dominant model of energy transition rests on the appropriation of the boundless resources of sunlight and wind and the accumulation of capital through the exploitation of those resources. Both these processes have, by and large, been enabled by state regulation, via national and regional governments and institutions.

At a local level, in the places and spaces where wind turbines and solar arrays are deployed, the appropriation of wind and solar energy shapes contestations over land, location, and technological impacts; in other words, it defines what is being fought over. The process of accumulation creates conflicts over who gets what, who benefits, and who bears the burdens. In other words, it generates new socio-spatial inequalities, or exacerbates existing ones. National, regional, and local governments mediate these processes of appropriation and accumulation through policy, regulation, and procedure. In so doing, they create an arena for contestations over decision-making processes, over whose interests are considered and whose are ignored, who is consulted and who is excluded, and how the identity of a region is defined.

This latter dimension – that of regulation and rivalry – relates to a further fundamental concern of this book, namely the question of democracy. In the journal article which preceded Timothy Mitchell’s influential book Carbon Democracy, Mitchell observes that ‘the democratic machineries that emerged to govern the age of carbon energy seem … unable to address the processes that may end it’ (Mitchell Reference Mitchell2009: 431). The ‘building of solutions to future energy needs’, argues Mitchell, must also involve ‘the building of new forms of collective life’ (Mitchell, ibid.). IRENA’s World Energy Transitions Outlook 2023 appears to echo this language, stating that accelerating the energy transition ‘requires a shift away from structures and systems built for the fossil fuel era’. The transition, write the report’s authors, can be a tool with which to proactively shape a ‘more equal and inclusive world’, but they give little or no guidance as to how this might be achieved.

Yet this aspiration for ‘systemic transformation’ is expressed not only in policy documents such as the IRENA report; it is also a central concern for the citizens and communities who are living the energy transition, and for whom it is embedded in the fabric of their everyday lives. As Seeta, an activist for climate democracy in the Indian state of Karnataka, put it to us in an interview:

Our aim in this book is to suggest some answers to the question Seeta raises here: how the energy transition might become a transformation. Our approach seeks to understand the energy transition, which is occurring in different forms, at different speeds, and in different countries as a social and political process. We set out to analyse the changed social and ecological relations which arise in the process of transitioning away from carbon energy. Renewable energy, we argue, is entangled with a wide range of social aspirations and conflicts. It is variously presented as a simple technical fix, a retro-fit of the existing system, an ‘energy transition’, or a wide-scale social and ‘energy transformation’. These agendas reflect the need to conceptualise the social organisation of energy, and wider energy legitimacy, as critical components in the process of societal decarbonisation under climate change.

Renewable energy is also vested with a variety of utopian hopes: for a distributed prosumer society, for transitional justice, energy democracy, international cooperation, and climate justice (Aranof et al. Reference Aranof, Battistoni, Cohen and Riofrancos2019; Szulecki & Overland Reference Szulecki and Overland2020). But does renewable energy have the capacity, by itself, to alter socio-ecological relations to create these possibilities?

As Mitchell argues in the Afterword to the 2013 edition of Carbon Democracy, ‘one cannot predict democratic possibilities directly from the design of socio-technical systems’ (Mitchell Reference Mitchell2013: 266). In many countries, right-wing populist parties have exploited dissatisfaction with the nature of renewable energy development and sought to build new constituencies around opposition to climate and energy policy (Lockwood and Lockwood Reference Lockwood and Lockwood2022). In battles over the shape of future energy systems, Mitchell argues, the question of democracy is open, and open to contestation (ibid.).

The process of contestation, we argue, is highly generative. The contestation of renewable energy development brings about a ‘re-politicisation’ of the energy sector at a local level, where previously the supply of electricity from coal and other sources had been taken for granted (Becker and Naumann Reference Becker, Naumann, Kühne and Weber2018: 518). Local actors interrupt and challenge the technocratic imperatives of development. Along the way, according to Becker and Naumann, ‘energy provision moves from being the province of technical, legal and business management experts to becoming a field of contestation, in which not only technologies and locations (sites) are at issue, but also a fundamental transformation of the energy system’ (ibid.). As the new energy system emerges, so too do new socio-ecological relations. These are often, but not solely, bound up with questions of justice: who wins and who loses, who carries the burdens, and who reaps the benefits. In seeking to exercise agency, to actively shape the ways in which renewable energy development impinges on their livelihoods and life-worlds, individuals and communities undergo a process of learning and make claims which, in turn, force governments and developers to respond and modify the design of the emerging energy system.

The advent of renewable energy, in short, ‘socialises’ climate change and climatises energy, posing questions of responsibility, agency, and capacity. It plays a key role in advancing emerging social imaginaries in the search for climate agency, and the required ethics of climate-changed life. There is a clear, and what may at times appear an unresolvable, tension between the urgency of decarbonisation and the timescale of systemic transformation. The rapid deployment of new renewable energy necessary to achieve climate goals puts enormous pressure on the democratic processes necessary to secure social legitimacy; governments and renewable energy developers want to speed up approval processes and streamline public consultation, but local communities often dig in their heels.

The process of contestation also challenges, more or less explicitly, what has, until recently, been a central assumption of much climate and energy policy; that renewable capital will clean up the mess that fossil capital has made. As indicated earlier, even transnational policy bodies such as IRENA are beginning to question this assumption. The social legitimacy of ‘green capitalism’ itself is under challenge on a number of fronts, from movements for climate justice, academic researchers such as ourselves, think tanks, and environmental NGOs. This book can and should be read as a contribution to the critique of green capitalism or ‘eco-modernism’ and an impulse towards the search for ‘new forms of collective life’ which might accompany the ‘building of solutions to future energy needs’ (Mitchell Reference Mitchell2013).

The Book

In Chapters 1 and 2 we introduce the conceptual architecture for the book. Three theoretical aspects are identified. In Chapter 1, we outline the socio-ecological appropriation of ‘nature’s free gifts’ of wind and sun for renewable energy, understood as a process of capture, which opens a new ‘frontier’ in capital-nature relations. We elaborate on the term ‘nature’s free gifts’ originally derived from Marx, and its use in Marxist approaches to ecology and social theory as documented by Saito (Reference Saito2022). Second, we highlight the process of securing a spatial, temporal, and social ‘fix’ for large-scale renewables, to enable accumulation, and as an emerging aspect of rivalry between region-level authorities and developers to reap the rewards of the renewable energy transition. Third, we focus on the social regulation of renewable accumulation, encompassing state authorities, corporates, workers, landowners, and communities, engaged in a contest to define models for renewable transition and lay claim to ‘nature’s free gifts’. These three strands are used to develop a conceptual model to interpret the social legitimacy of renewable transition and to guide the comparative analysis.

Chapter 2 tracks the field of renewable energy transition in the three sub-national states where the ethnographic studies are located: Karnataka, Brandenburg, and South Australia. It applies the conceptual model outlined in Chapter 1 to address the full scope of the transition in these regions. The model is used to analytically ‘unbundle’ the dimensions of transition in the three contrasting regions of study, allowing deeper understanding of the relations in play. The chapter focuses on each state in turn, providing historical and contemporary data about renewable energy policy-making and development at the region level in the context of national authorities and global institutions and agencies. We demonstrate the process of renewable ‘capture’ by capital, but also how it is contested and the extent to which it prefigures more democratic social relations and new ‘forms of collective life’.

In the second part of the book, we discuss the variable experiences of large-scale renewables in localities undergoing intensive development. While policy discourse tends to frame such development as a ‘win-win’ for investors as well as for climate, there is a more mixed response in host communities where the granular changes to everyday life, environment, and livelihoods can loom large. The three chapters investigate how locals obtain benefits and shoulder burdens at this nexus, and how their engagement with these developments produces new socio-ecological relations. The chapters analyse how local economies and social life are reshaped by the new industry, as new opportunities and tensions emerge among developers, state agencies, and local participants, in the contest to capture wealth on the renewable energy frontier. The accounts look for generative dynamics, that open up new fields of public contestation and pose the possibility of new, more democratised socio-ecological relations.

In Chapter 3, we explore the social relations of renewable energy and everyday life in the Indian state of Karnataka, focusing on the 2 GW Pavagada solar energy park, said to be the largest in Asia, and on the experience of wind energy at the local level. It analyses these installations in the historical context of national and state-level energy policy, framed by wider developmental dynamics and stratification in the Karnataka locality. We contrast the renewable ‘resource’ with fossil fuel sources and highlight differences between solar and wind power. We discuss the drive to attract renewable investment to the region, along with development finance, in the context of Karnataka’s development trajectory. We interpret the transition to renewable energy in terms of social structures, and the extent to which it exacerbates or alleviates pre-existing social divides. In this respect, we see renewable energy, and conflicts centred on it as part of existing social processes, rather than an abstraction from them. There is a strong focus on implications for land, water, livelihood, caste, gender, and environment, including for instance the role, or displacement, of rural landless and lower-caste groups.

Chapter 4 centres on the expansion of wind power and the subsequent ‘solar rush’ in the German ‘energy state’ of Brandenburg, where the energy transition (or Energiewende) has been underway for more than two decades. We follow the unfolding process of renewable energy development and socio-ecological capture, paying particular attention to the changing scale of operations exemplified by a move to larger wind turbines and the current shift to large-scale solar farms. We show how the German wind power planning system, designed to avoid or prevent local conflicts, has, at least in some localities, had the perverse effect of intensifying them. We explore the role of local-level planning processes and the imperatives of nature and landscape conservation in the evolution of a socio-temporal ‘fix’ for renewable investment, and how these interact with corporate investor interests. The chapter provides a rich account of the nexus between a well-established renewables sector and other forms of land use, such as leisure, aesthetics, agriculture, or forestry. The conflict between narratives of regional and local development, prompted, defined, and mobilised in the energy transition, is seen as opening new fields of engagement and disputation in the emerging ‘green’ economy. As we show, distributional conflicts over the financial benefits of renewable development have led to experimentation with new models of benefit sharing and greater consideration of social ownership.

Chapter 5 focuses on South Australia’s Upper Spencer Gulf region in South Australia, which now aspires to 500% renewable energy by 2050. The state has access to world-best onshore wind and solar, with downstream industrial linkages that are now fuelling new spatio-temporal planning horizons. While the state promotes the new energy industry as a ‘green’ industrial economy, ethnographic research reveals mixed outcomes. Local socio-ecological relations are changing favourably for some groups, such as host landowners and Aboriginal native title holders. Others find themselves left out or further marginalised. Post-construction, renewable energy installations offer few jobs, in localities where unemployment rates are high. Dissatisfaction erupts during the project application processes, where the limits of local demands for meaningful involvement, equitable sharing of benefits, and accountable planning regulation become clear. These, we argue, pose significant threats to the social legitimacy of renewable energy.

The three ethnographic chapters point to a range of comparative and normative insights. These are drawn together in the third part of the book to map the emerging terrain for the social legitimacy of global renewable energy. Chapter 6 draws together evidence-based insights into how renewable energy has been developed in the three regions. The three-part framework outlined in the opening chapter is used to analyse problems of legitimacy in renewable energy development in the three contexts. The three dimensions of appropriation, accumulation, and regulation shape the comparative analysis and underpin a suggested schema for interpreting legitimacy issues in renewable energy transitions. We discuss how progress has been attained, both locally and in terms of the intersecting dynamics of global policy, finance, and advocacy in constituting region-level transitions.

From this, the Conclusions widen the lens to develop a series of substantive recommendations for policymakers, regional, national, and global, who are seeking to strengthen public legitimacy for electricity decarbonisation. It also seeks to draw out implications, in the long haul, for recasting socio-ecological relations under climate change in more democratic directions to realise its fullest potential for societal transformation and democratic engagement. As with energy transitions in the past, the current juncture offers manifold (still undreamt-of) possibilities: we argue for a transition regime that allows for such possibilities to be fostered and realised. There is capacity and agency for distributed renewables, for energy transformations and new forms of energy social ownership and democratisation, in other words, for a ‘re-commoning’ of socio-ecological relations.