Mining the Sun: Coal-to-solar transitions and energetic place-making in Appalachia

Abstract

A striking effort is under way to use energy investment, a key feature of US federal climate policy, to build solar farms on former mining lands and in legacy mining communities in central Appalachia. Focusing on community solar initiatives, we consider the geosociality of energy transitions from the perspective of communities where many people have considerable knowledge of energy systems and how they work. We note that the politics of place-making in the context of environmental sacrifice and capital abandonment enables negotiations around energy that often seek to bridge deep social contradictions. We highlight how solar energy’s diffuse networks of power, both social and electrical, privilege forms of temporal labor that are alliance-building, compositionist, para-ethnographic and intimately concerned with the capacity to build relations. Vernacular energy expertise can play a major role in creating novel forms of political sociality. In West Virginia, this both builds on and significantly shifts the emphasis of long legacies of energetic place-making. We expect the ongoing development of community-led solar investment to contribute to substantially important diversifying effects in West Virginian communities, especially when these efforts can more explicitly address the state’s extreme geographical, race, and class-based inequalities.