Energy Geographies Research Articles

Making the energy connection: A review of the geographies of high-voltage transmission

Energy is a resurgent topic in geography and cognate fields, but its theoretical development and empirical exploration have been uneven. I argue that centering transmission as an analytical lens — rather than treating it as incidental to extraction, generation, and consumption — brings the multi-scalar spatial politics of energy systems into the foreground through attention to circulation. This article reviews work on transmission from energy geographies, science and technology studies, and the histories of energy, technology, and the environment, identifying four main themes. First, transmission is used as a lens to examine larger energy metabolisms and how the circulation of electricity entrenches spatial relations. Second, transmission is an instrument of state territorialization, both within and across borders. Third, transmission, as a particular form of electricity capital, is subject to specific regimes of accumulation and regulation. Finally, transmission lines can become objects of social contestation that entangle multi-scalar politics of energy transition, electrification, and development. The article concludes by identifying areas for further research — empirical, theoretical, and policy-oriented — through which scholarly attention to transmission can inform energy geographies, energy studies, and human-environment geography more broadly.

The sufficiency-based, the de-growth, and the official – Critical remarks of the electricity chapter of the Hungarian national energy and climate plan based on a comparison to alternative scenarios

Hungary relies heavily on fossil and nuclear fuel imports from Russia. An urgent challenge is to develop a more sustainable and more independent energy system. There is a 2019 and a 2023 (draft) version of the National Energy and Climate Plan (NECP) but they arguably do not follow this direction. However, there are also alternative scenarios for Hungary that propose more comprehensive changes. This paper compares the targets proposed by the Hungarian NECPs to those proposed in two alternative studies: the sufficiency-based European-focused CLEVER (Collaborative Low Energy Vision for the European Region) scenario (created by a research team including 26 partner organisations from 20 European countries), and the de-growth-based “This Way Ahead” (TWA) scenario (which is the result of a Hungarian inter-university research, coordinated by the ELTE University's energy geography research group). A new element of this recent study is the simulation of hourly electricity supply and demand in these scenarios using EnergyPLAN to compare import requirements, potential surplus generation, and self-sufficiency. The review shows that the NECPs need to be reconsidered to increase the share of decentralized renewable electricity supply in a way that allows progress without increasing energy use and environmental burdens. Priority must be given to the rapid expansion of wind energy capacity by at least 10–20 times, which should be complemented by biogas-based flexible energy supply.

Watt sense of community? A human geography agenda on energy communities

Energy communities can potentially advance just transitions towards low-carbon systems by devolving energy production and consumption to local scales. During vibrant debates on evolving energy geographies for more than a decade, human geographers have engaged with conceptualization and emergent models of energy communities in generative ways. We argue for a research agenda where these understandings of space, place and scale enhance research on energy communities. Three points hold particular importance and relevance for this agenda: (a) Pluralising understandings of energy communities, (b) Spatializing perspectives on the potential of energy communities to advance just transitions, and (c) Contextually situating technological-energy innovation strategies.

Beyond environmental harm: Industry claims, lived experiences, and the impacts of gas extraction

The peer-reviewed literature presents overwhelming evidence that fossil fuel based energy infrastructure projects are responsible for lower residential property values, environmental destruction and pollution that decrease residents' quality of life. These projects also challenge local people's sense of identity and even the threat of such a project can make residents question their sense of place. As evidence, we first present a bibliographic analysis of the environmental impact statements for the Mountain Valley Pipeline in West Virginia and the Jordan Cove Energy Project in Oregon. We find that their approval processes relies on non-peer-reviewed, industry-funded claims that pipelines will bring economic benefit and will have no effect on property values. Second, through original interview data gathered between 2019 and 2021 in West Virginia and in 2021 in Oregon, we engage with the concepts of sense of identity and sense of place to demonstrate that regardless of the local context, fossil fuel based energy infrastructure projects cause more than environmental damage; they trigger emotional reactions in residents that see or fear seeing their everyday lives upended. Taken together, this Perspective contributes to the emerging field of emotional energy geography to show how the plans and implementation of oil and gas pipelines become crucial turning points in residents' lives.

Intime Infrastrukturen: Feministisch-geographische Perspektiven auf Energie

Abstract. Facing multiple and embodied inequalities inscribed in the energy system, this intervention argues for a feminist perspective on energy geographies. Extending critical research on urban infrastructure with concepts of care, it seeks to contribute to more just energy relations. In a first step, the article examines two energy fields: The home, where gender identities are produced and challenged, and the urban, where practices of solidarity oppose the conditions of care work in the context of neoliberal service provision. Shedding light on those „labourious spaces“, where urban materialities and its subjects are closely interconnected (Lancione and McFarlane, 2016), I reveal how heterogeneous infrastructural experiences are constantly contested within multiple entanglements of energy flows, gendered labour and care practices. In a second step, I provide three impulses for a relational perspective on energy. I argue for taking the intimate aspects of urban infrastructure as a starting point for feminist scholarship; for tracing a crisis of social reproduction along embodied energetic experiences; and for creating a collective vision of caring infrastructures.

Geography and environment: New conversations, new communities

AbstractIn this Editorial, the Geo: Geography and Environment Editors reflect on the journal over the past year, highlighting some of the key papers published and ‘Geo Themes’ being developed: ‘Decolonising Climate Geography’; ‘Climate Change, AI and Sustainability’; ‘Geographies of Energy Futures’. The Editors renew the call for submissions on these topics and put out a new call for Special Section proposals on subjects around the environment, climate and sustainability.

Thoughts on ‘planetary rural geographies’: Commonalties of capitalist development, authoritarian populisms, and energy transition

In contrast to the urban-centric framing of planetary urbanization, the concept of ‘planetary rural geographies’ emphasizes the ongoing importance and distinctiveness of pluriversal rural spaces and identities, including their continued centrality to the global economy. It also argues that rural spaces are especially defined by diverse relationships between the human and non-human that must be understood volumetrically, rather than through largely two-dimensional territorial imaginaries. These themes are developed and illustrated via consideration of contemporary rural geographies as spaces of crisis, spaces of conflict, and spaces of hope. The concept of planetary rural geographies could be enhanced by greater attention to key analytical commonalties among admittedly diverse rural geographies, particularly with respect to broader dynamics of capitalist development and climate change, an effort that could be supported via greater engagement between the literatures on specifically rural geographies, and those on rural populisms, climate adaptation and mitigation, and energy geographies.

Abolition solarities: Theorizing antiracist and anticapitalist solar energy insurrections

We arrive at an auspicious inflection point in the proliferation of solar photovoltaic systems. Apprised of particular and patterned racial and gendered solar injustices across disparate energy geographies, scholars and practitioners must harness solar power in the service of the total abolition of racial power structures that enshrine inequalities in colonial-capitalist accumulation. Antiracist and anticapitalist approaches to solar interventions can potentially transform social relations and empower the victims of energy injustices. Abolition solarities avail emancipation and redistribution through dismantling white supremacist processes and logics that structure energy regimes. How can solar simultaneously stitch translocal and transnational nets of safety and solidarity among subaltern architects and inheritors of abolition democracy? Aspiring to the existential obligation to change everything, let us wire solar to elucidate emancipation.

Discursive trends and their socio-ecological implications in Senegal's renewable energy turn

By 2025, Senegal's energy mix will have shifted from one reliant on heavy fuel oil to one consisting primarily of solar and wind energy as well as liquefied natural gas. The expectation is that this will lead to lower greenhouse gas emissions, more affordable power, and broad-based growth and development. Despite the necessity of a transition to renewable energy, scholarship in critical energy geographies has cautioned that such a transition could (re)produce socio-environmental injustices. Yet only a relatively small (but growing) number of studies in the political ecology of renewable energy literature examines how energy transitions are framed and justified as part of national-level narratives in the global South. Understanding this is critical because framing (renewable) energy in relation to national development objectives is a strategy central to the material development of renewable energy projects. Through a case study of Senegal, this paper examines the national-level discourses that underlie the country's turn towards utility-scale renewable energy by analyzing key documents and institutional interviews (carried out between 2018 and 2020). Findings show that a dominant group of development actors along with state institutions mobilizes a “grand narrative” on economic growth and poverty reduction vis a vis renewable energy development to facilitate a shift to renewables that rests on market logics, with questionable implications for equity and justice. The paper reflects on the implications of this narrative for the potential of a just energy transition in Senegal, as well as the broader theoretical and empirical implications of the research.

Volta photovoltaics: Ruptures in resource access as gendered injustices for solar energy in Ghana

Increasing renewable energy capacity to achieve climate goals will necessitate the rapid development of utility-scale solar plants throughout Ghana. Situated in the impoverished Upper West region, the Kaleo Lawra solar plant serves as a grim admonition. Drawing from mixed methods fieldwork and the literatures of feminist political ecology and critical energy geography, we examine the following research question: How has the development of the Kaleo Lawra solar plant influenced gendered livelihoods and resource access? The solar plant was developed to mitigate the climate crisis and combat energy poverty but actually exacerbates social vulnerabilities through energy and resource dispossessions. Although the government of Ghana has committed to mainstream gender considerations within all national climate and energy policies and development processes, solar enclosures in the agrarian Upper West have effectively produced a gendered surplus population without resources and livelihoods. Yet respondents had an overall “neutral to favorable” perception about the solar park. Maintaining optimism in the face of deprivation is a demonstration of courage and resilience, a renewable resource more valuable than farmed photons on fenced fields.

Geography: Do we advocate enough for the discipline and profession in terms of public policy?

Geography: Do we advocate enough for the discipline and profession in terms of public policy?

Petrocultural Formations: Crisis Discourse, Energy Geographies, and Neo-liberalism

The 1970s energy crises was a decisive point in US culture and in the development of neo-liberal geographies. After the post-war period of rapid economic growth, Western economies sputtered and stalled. Cutting across political, economic, and cultural spheres, the discourse of energy crisis brought narrative coherence to what was, in fact, a heterogenous historical moment. In doing so, energy crisis discourse facilitated dramatic social and economic restructuring, as well as shifts in the distributions of lived spaces and times. More broadly, energy crisis discourse played a significant role in configuring the emerging processes of neo-liberalization and bringing about a set of historical outcomes, herein elucidated in three figures: the suburb, energy, and the entrepreneur.

Geographies of Energy: Key Issues and Challenges towards Spatial Justice Concepts

The contemporary world is uneven not only in terms of the quality of life and economic development, but also in cultural issues that define awareness of global development processes. Geographies of energy co-create various energy paradigms and territorial development scenarios. This paper has two general aims. First, we want to identify the main fields of study within the geographies of energy. We try to define a general model of geographic analysis in terms of key concepts. The second aim concerns the definition of perspectives of geography of energy as a growing field of interest for researchers. We believe that geographies of energy should undertake a contemporary transition in this area from the point of view of scale and relativity resulting from the presented dimensions of spatiality and locality, i.e., differential, vertical, horizontal and transversal approaches.

Off-Grid Electrical Urbanism: Emerging Solar Energy Geographies in Ordinary Cities

ABSTRACT Off-grid solar products, which are typically positioned as a solution to rural energy poverty, have experienced rapid sales growth in urban centers across the Global South over the last decade. In this article, we critically examine the rapidly emerging off-grid electrical urbanism in the Global South, with a focus on how off-grid solar technologies are reshaping urban energy geographies in “ordinary cities.” We document how forms of off-grid electrical urbanisms have emerged as a response to urban energy poverty, drawing on case study insights from Gulu (Uganda), Mzuzu (Malawi), and Luganville (Vanuatu). In doing so, we demonstrate how the flow of off-grid solar products are shaped by a range of differing political economies—including financial flows, migration dynamics, and regional aid programs. We go on to argue that off-grid electrical urbanism, in its current form, is largely underpinned by a marketized model of energy infrastructure dissemination. A model that tends to reproduce geographies of energy inequality.

Energy geographies in/of the Anthropocene: Where now?

AbstractThe Anthropocene has thrown at us a challenge of balancing urgency and justice. Urgency brought about by myriad environmental crises, most prominently being climate change, and justice that any adequate response to these crises needs to be rooted in. This is a dilemma because we need pathways for urgent action on climate mitigation and energy transitions while centring the slow and considered work that historical and contemporary justice questions demand. This is because while the Anthropocene calls humans to unite, its impacts have been, are, and will be, felt differently. The Anthropocene narrative's framing of a universal humanity connects to a long and dangerous history of what is human and what qualifies as humanity, a history of colonising, racializing, and dehumanising black, brown, and indigenous bodies around the world. We need narratives of the Anthropocene that confirm the importance of decolonising political, economic, and scientific institutions, not to deny urgency, but to foster a more political Anthropocene that creates space for new narratives of justice. The question then, that this paper initiates, is: How to progress anti–and de‐colonial thought for energy geographies within a somewhat colonising discourse of urgency in/of the Anthropocene? To think of energy geographies of/in the Anthropocene, one that explicitly embeds within itself justice, this paper outlines three areas of work. First, the paper proposes a need to engage with and learn from energy histories other than those from the Euro‐American contexts. Second, it urges more focus on the question of difference. Third, the paper proposes a deeper engagement with critical race theory and postcolonial/decolonial theories to investigate questions of justice. These proposals are provocations to open energy geographies to a wider range of questions, approaches, and concerns.

Recharging China in War and Revolution, 1882-1955 by Ying Jia Tan (review).

Reviewed by: Recharging China in War and Revolution, 1882–1955 by Ying Jia Tan Zhaojin Zeng (bio) Recharging China in War and Revolution, 1882–1955 By Ying Jia Tan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021. Pp. 294. China, the largest fossil energy consumer today, recently vowed to decarbonize its economy. The country has announced plans to reach peak emissions in 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060. These ambitious goals have once again drawn wide attention to the development trajectory of China as a carbon economy. In Recharging China in War and Revolution, 1882–1955, Ying Jia Tan offers a timely account of China's energy history, detailing its electrical development from the late Qing to the early Mao periods. Tan discusses three interrelated aspects of China's electrification: local efforts to secure electricity supply, national strategies to pursue energy independence and economic sovereignty, and, at the planetary level, China's entry through accelerated industrial growth into the Anthropocene Epoch. Framing electrical industries as a central site for power struggles and technological competition, Tan argues that the intertwined processes of infrastructure development and state-building gave rise to resilient political and economic institutions in China after war and revolution. A multilevel analysis of individuals, agencies, and regimes pioneering China's electrical growth, Tan's book sheds new insights on the complex relationship between energy, politics, and state-making in the early twentieth century. [End Page 921] As Tan reveals, China's path toward a carbon-intensive economy stemmed from constant energy crises. Chronic power shortages in everyday life and power loss during wartime became the major impetus for governments and elites to build and control the electrical infrastructure. The engineer-bureaucrats, in particular, brokered the electrification process. They did so while vying for dominance over the new infrastructure. In the Lower Yangtze areas, where cotton mills and silk filatures were concentrated, newly built power stations and grids generated not only electricity but also tensions and conflicts between local elites, government officials, and factory workers. The grip on energy supply allowed the Shanghai Municipal Council to intervene in the labor strikes at the British and Japanese mills. Local power stations also became a weapon for Huzhou industrial elites to fend off the Nationalist government's nationalization efforts. In these two cases, Tan highlights the crucial role of electricity production and consumption in the shaping of everyday politics and nation-building in the early Republican era. Tracing the footsteps of engineer-bureaucrats, Tan continues to examine how wartime electrification centralized state power. The Sino-Japanese War and World War II witnessed a new wave of energy-infrastructure development spearheaded by different authorities: Nationalist China, Imperial Japan, and the United States. In the north, the Japanese regime rationalized coal distribution and reorganized the regional power networks. The Nationalists in the southwest also resorted to a greater degree of state intervention. Tan shows that the Electrical Works represented the Chinese state's remarkable efforts to improve energy efficiency by applying advanced technology, optimizing resource use, and establishing industrial standards. China's wartime energy story also involves the transnational flow of human capital. American dam builders and Chinese engineers made the joint—albeit unsuccessful—attempt to survey the Yangtze Gorges in the hope of reconfiguring China's energy geography. Nevertheless, the war deepened China's coal reliance, making the country march further toward a carbon-intensive economy. Electrical industries transformed into political assets in the postwar years. Failing to appropriate major power plants doomed the Nationalist regime's plan to restore economic and social order. The Communists, by contrast, chose a more cooperative and lenient approach toward engineering elites. In so doing, the new regime turned the electrical infrastructure into the economic foundation for its political rule. Following the founding of the People's Republic, electricity supply further increased, but mostly through labor mobilization and social control rather than new capital investments. Those practices strengthened the state's control over the industries, paving the way for a state-led, labor-intensive developmental approach that descended on the country after 1955. Tan's narrative, ending on the eve of China's accelerated industrial growth, thus invites scholars to [End Page 922] explore how energy continued to propel China...

Re-powering the Nature-Intensive Systems: Insights From Linking Nature-Based Solutions and Energy Transition

Nature-based and energy transition strategies are amongst most considerable solutions that are gaining popularity in recent years, especially in global north. This review provides a new approach to link these apparently independent concepts to highlight the potentials of coupled systems. Exploring common boundary concepts such as energy infrastructure, natural capital, land sink, ecosystem services etc. in both energy and environmental geography fields can facilitate our understanding toward potential contributions of nature-based solutions and energy transition for efficiency and sustainability goals. The results of this review can help to further develop robust coupled systems to deal with urban societal and environmental challenges such as land and energy scarcity. This review presents a variety of theoretical foundations and the rationales behind nature-based solutions and energy transition including socio-technical transitions, socio-ecological-technological, land-energy transition, and circular economy scholarships. Finally, by proposing future research directions, the role of each boundary concept in coupled NbS-ET systems is shown.

New frontiers of electricity capital: energy access in sub-Saharan Africa

ABSTRACT While recent years have seen the rapid growth of off-grid solar power, ten per cent of the world’s population, the majority in sub-Saharan Africa, still lack access to electricity. Meanwhile, standalone solar home systems using pay as you go (PAYGO) mobile money have been proposed as a key solution to meeting the target of universal access to energy under Sustainable Development Goal 7. These systems are being deployed in various regions of the global South, including East Africa and to a lesser extent West Africa. I investigate how through PAYGO, off-grid solar electricity in sub-Saharan Africa is being transformed into a cash flow, a financial asset and a conduit for consumer debt. In so doing I analyse evolving relationships between some of the key actors and institutions involved in this process, including mobile banking platforms such as M-Pesa, ‘next generation utilities’ such as M-KOPA and BBOXX, and powerful mobile network operators such as Safaricom and MTN. Theoretically I conceptualise energy access as a new frontier of ‘electricity capital’, a developing field from political economy and energy geography, which is concerned with the way in which technological developments in the electricity sector are reconfiguring relationships between different institutions of the state, industry, finance, and users.

Collaboration and continuous learning

Collaboration and continuous learning

The impact of precarious security conditions on renewable electrification: The case of the West Bank

Recent energy-related writing has highlighted the spatiality of renewable energy and its possible affinity to geopolitics. Yet, energy geography and geopolitics literature lack reference to security and how it may shape the energy landscape. This study unpacks the elusive concepts of security and territoriality and operationalizes them into measurable variables. Using statistical and qualitative methods, including an original dataset based on planning and building protocols, this study tests the interplay between security conditions and territoriality on renewable energy adoption. It examines the case study of the contested Area C territory in the West Bank, within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The findings show that precarious security conditions discourage renewable energy diffusion, particularly when security is linked to territorial conflict. As land-intensive infrastructures, renewable energy systems challenge territorial claims. This study demonstrates how space acts as an intermediate variable connecting security concerns with the diffusion of renewable technology. Security interests use spatial planning as a key mechanism to negatively influence on renewable energy diffusion in contested territory, such as Area C, where power asymmetry heavily leans to the advantage of one party. These findings contradict the argument that renewable energy is a catalyst for peace building. They show how renewable energy projects create inequalities and are often held hostage by the territorial dispute between Israel and the Palestinians.