Scaling Down Power

Concetti, Costanza

Abstract

Distributed Generation systems (DG) are small, often renewable, and localised technologies that feed electricity directly into distribution networks, including rooftop solar panels, small wind turbines, and micro hydro-electric screws (Parag & Sovacool, 2016). In the past twenty years, they have been fast proliferating (Sioshansi, 2017), thus transforming numerous energy landscapes (Frolova et al., 2015) and leading a growing number of scholars to believe they may play a central role in enacting local energy transitions (Koirala et al., 2016). This paper takes inspiration from the concept of “distributed energy politics”, which understands that DG “enable and organize distributed political power and vice versa” (Burke & Stephens, 2018, 78), to analyse DG schemes deployed by civil society groups and municipalities as intruders that may be disrupting the sociomaterial structures of both conventional electricity generation and centralised nation states. It recognises that these new assemblages may be rendering obsolete the very large built environments and infrastructures that have carried imaginaries of national legitimacy (Harris, 2012) and “encod[ed] and reinforc[ed] particular conceptions of what a nation stands for” (Jasanoff & Kim, 2009, 123). The paper thus offers conceptual space to engage with how the infrastructures of decarbonised energy generation may decentre political power away from the State toward and devoluted governments. In doing so, it understands local energy transitions enacted through DG deployment to be “co-produced, constructed and emergent” (Chilvers & Pallett, 2018, 1) but also intensely material in how their agential matter allows publics with unique ontological politics and unique political abilities to emerge (Bakker and Bridge, unpublished; Barry, 2013)

Citation

Concetti, C. (2021). Scaling Down Power.

• Conference Name: RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2020 - Locating climate action and policy in urban and regional geography
• Acceptance Date: Feb 21, 2020
• Online Publication Date: Sep 2, 2021
• Publication Date: 2021
• Deposit Date: Apr 5, 2023