Renewable Energies

Matthias Gross, Rüdiger Mautz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135102975
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Renewable Energy normally refers to usable energy sources that are an alternative to fuel sources, but without the negatively evaluated consequences of the replaced fuels. Although energy issues have a long tradition in sociology and other social sciences, it may now be high time to conceptualize these in sociological terms as the lynchpin in our understanding of the way societies are set to develop in the 21st century.

This concise book focuses on sociological attempts at better framing contemporary theories of energy transformations and to deliver an accessible overview on the relationships between different types of renewable energy sources and their practical usages in modern societies. A strong focus is laid upon new forms of environmental governance and unavoidable knowledge gaps triggered by attempts to transform contemporary energy systems to renewable ones.

Critical topics include the challenge of transition from centralized to decentralized system structures, the integration of renewable energies into existing energy structures or the replacement of these, coping strategies to unforeseen risks and conflict issues, and socio-cultural reservations to new technologies connected to renewable energies.

1 Introduction

The next great experiment

DOI: 10.4324/9780203798027-1

Research and theory in sociology often focus on unexpected and sometimes paradoxical phenomena. As such, they are concerned with the way in which alternative societal structures and fundamentally new social processes come about. This has led some scholars to argue that the Western world is subject to epochal breaks that periodically mark its entry into a new kind of society (the information society, the knowledge society, the risk society, for example), one that departs fundamentally from previous political, ecological, technical, or cultural orders. Meanwhile, other scholars point to long-term evolutionary processes, situating the emergence of novel aspects of society within longer term processes associated with modernity. This tension between focusing either on radical shifts or on long-term accounts can be observed in particular in the context of debates around alternative energy sources and energy transitions in twenty-first-century societies. On the one hand, it seems to be generally accepted that energy transitions are inherently gradual, incremental processes that cannot be driven forward by the formulaic style of thinking reflected in targets, such as 20 percent of total electricity produced from renewable energy sources by 2020 and 50 percent by 2050 (see Podobnik 2006, Smil 2010). On the other hand, a number of prominent figures are now speaking of peak oil, peak coal, indeed peak everything, thereby heralding an epochal break that is argued to be either coming soon or already upon us – whether by political will or by necessity (see Heinberg 2007, Scheer 2012, Urry 2013). In order to understand these shifts (however they may be conceptualized), sociological analysis needs to focus its attention on both the regional and local levels of decentralized energy initiatives, as well as on nationally and globally anchored processes of energy utilization.

Whereas sociologists, anthropologists, economists, political science scholars, and historians (among many others) have taken an innovation-oriented approach to technology and to different socio-political systems and their modes of production, what they have at times overlooked is the fact that it was non-renewable fossil fuels that made possible in the first place what has often been referred to as “industrial civilization,” or what Mark Blumler (2008) has called “the great experiment.” Given that the non-renewable resources on which this experiment was based are becoming more and more difficult and costly to extract, it is surely safe to say that the next great experiment will be one in which the transition to renewable resources is the crucial task; after all, our civilization cannot continue to exist in its current form without an uninterrupted supply of energy.

In his well-known reconstruction of the early stages of human history, Leslie White (1949) noted that people originally utilized their muscles as a source of energy, eventually supplementing this through the domestication and use of animals (methods still widely in use around the world even today). With the agricultural revolution and the end of nomadic ways of life, the first human settlements were founded on the use of energy from plants and food crops. In the next stage described by White, human communities learned to extract and use natural resources, such as coal and oil. Writing in the 1940s, White saw nuclear energy as the next important step (like many others at that time, he adopted an uncritical stance towards this energy source). Whether or not White was correct in his historical reconstruction of human history as a history of energy expansion (from human muscles to nuclear power), it appears to be inevitable that the twenty-first century will bring yet another energy transition – or expansion – if highly industrialized societies are to survive. What this also points to, however, is a marked decline in existing sources of energy, something White did not discuss. Coal, gas, and oil will not be available forever, and the impacts (both in the present and over the very long term) of nuclear power appear to be increasingly unacceptable to many citizens so that the next transition will involve discarding existing practices and technologies of energy utilization on the household as well as the industrial level. This can be understood as a process of “exnovation” – the reverse side of the innovation-oriented view of progress at the end of the nuclear or fossil fuel age – in which existing forms of energy utilization are discarded in order to enable the emergence of new and experimental forms of energy utilizing activities. Although the use of the term exnovation varies in different contexts, we take it to refer in general terms to processes that steer the energy transition towards greater sustainability, that is, towards processes that open up greater possibilities for the well-being of future generations and the integrity of ecological systems over extended periods of time. This would involve ruling out practices, technologies, and forms of energy utilization that lead to unsustainable processes (see Paech 2013, Sveiby et al. 2012).

In one of the earliest attempts to define exnovation, organization theorist John Kimberly described it as a practice that is located at the very end of a multi-stage innovation process, in fact as “the removal of an innovation from an organization. Exnovation occurs when an organization divests itself of an innovation in which it had previously invested” (Kimberly 1981: 91). Kimberly stresses that exnovation may differ from merely discontinuing use of an innovation; exnovation implies active rejection of an innovation that has been invested in previously. Abstracting from the organizational level on which Kimberly focuses, we can say that, although there is much debate about when fossil fuels will effectively be used up (i.e. whether global peak oil has already been reached or whether it is still a few decades away), hardly anybody seriously doubts that accessible fossil fuels will eventually be depleted and that a “business as usual” take on energy utilization is no longer tenable for a variety of sociocultural, economic, political, and ecological reasons. In short, exnovation may soon become a question of necessity rather than one of choice. From a sociological point of view, a further crucial point to bear in mind is that increasing energy consumption does not automatically lead to an increase in quality of life (Buttel 1978, Mazur and Rosa 1974, Rosa et al. 1988); on the contrary, it has the potential to lead toward societal collapse. Thus, efforts aimed at simply reducing the side effects of energy consumption by achieving energy efficiency may not be helpful. Indeed, as Richard York (2012) has argued, implementing efficiency measures and finding substitutes for traditional energy sources often do not lead to the intended outcome when net effects are considered. This further underlines our argument that both innovation and exnovation in energy transformation processes need to be conceptualized as part of sociotechnical systems embedded in public policy and governance. In this sense, they can be conceptualized as social innovations (Howaldt et al. 2014, Rückert-John 2013) that are able to meet people’s needs and support their well-being in an environmentally sustainable manner.

Ignorance and experiment: ironic perspective in sociology

The following pages in this book describe the processes entailed in transitioning from one form of energy supply (known variously as fossil fuels or non-renewable energies) to a different one (known collectively as renewables) as an inherent challenge for understanding the world in the twenty-first century and developing theories about it for this purpose. Social and technological processes of transition have been addressed by virtually all the classical sociologists and can thus be regarded as a core theme of sociology per se.

In this book, therefore, we will not only discuss specific examples of local experimentation in energy transition but will also shed light on the broader and longer term processes of the “next great experiment” in energy transition. This will be done first by attending to classical as well as contemporary views on energy issues, beginning with Herbert Spencer’s musings on energy and society and moving on to consider, among others, Max Weber’s reflections on the role of energy supply in the rise and continued dominance of capitalism. This will be followed by a look at recent developments in transition management in sociology and related fields, which seek to provide an explanatory context for processes of transformation ranging from everyday practices and niche experimentation to large-scale economic and political processes underway in modern societies.

Second, the book will situate recent attempts to change forms of energy consumption at the national level within longer standing debates about phasing out nuclear power. Amidst a recent backslide in many countries towards increasing reliance on coal to generate electricity, such debates include attempts to demonstrate that renewables can fill the nuclear gap quickly enough and in a cost-effective way, thereby forestalling an otherwise inexorable return to coal. In this context it is important to consider the unintended consequences, unpleasant surprises, and rebound effects triggered by attempts to transform contemporary energy systems to renewable ones – not least because given that this great experiment cannot be controlled, such attempts may lead to lock-in effects, adverse developments, and possibly even a return to the agricultural stage of modern societies. In sum, the issue of energy can be understood in sociological terms as the lynchpin in our understanding of the way societies – indeed modernity and progress in general – are set to develop in the twenty-first century. Given that the expansion of renewables will not occur proportionately to the phase out of fossil fuel-based energy use, the experimental transition from a mainly fossil fuel-based energy system to a world of renewable energy will require not just technological change but also sociocultural transformation.

On the basis of this understanding, experiments and unexpected sociotechnical change share some crucial similarities. An experiment can be defined in the most general sense as a cautiously observed venture into the unknown. An experiment is deliberately arranged to generate unexpected events and the surprising effects derived from the experimental set up can be seen as the driver behind the production of new knowledge, not least because surprises help the experimenter to become aware of their ignorance. If an experiment has failed and the hypothesis has been falsified, then the experimenter has been successful (see Brock 2010). This can be related to what Louis Schneider once called the ironic perspective in sociology. An ironic perspective often fosters a “wry smile just because one witnesses the bafflement or mockery of the fitness of things, of their supposed-to-be character” (Schneider 2012: 324). Put differently, most social processes involve an element of surprise, where the consequences can be the opposite of what was originally intended. The crucial difference is that such surprises or “failures” in a laboratory experiment, when greeted with a “wry smile,” are welcomed and can even be considered as successes, whereas in contemporary processes of energy transition they normally are not. In the real world, failures are to be avoided, of course. This book therefore also seeks to locate the planned unexpectedness of experiments and the governance of ignorance at the heart of current strategies to establish greater use of renewable energy.

Given that the acknowledgement of ignorance is a crucial element in processes of experimentation, ignorance cannot be thought of simply as the absence of knowledge. If this were the case, it would clearly be judged to be an undesirable condition. Scholars in many disciplines have recently begun to challenge this negative assumption, exploring the ways in which ignorance can be more than simply the obverse of knowledge. Such inquiries have demonstrated that ignorance has a social and political life of its own (for an overview, see Gross and McGoey 2015). They have pointed out that in many areas of social life, individuals often need to act in spite of (sometimes) well-defined ignorance, or what has more recently been termed nonknowledge – the possibility of becoming knowledgeable about the specifics of one’s own ignorance (Gross 2010a, 2012). Unlike the notion of ignorance, nonknowledge refers to knowledge about what is not known but is reasonably well defined. Nonknowledge constitutes a more precise form of the unknown and can thus be used when describing how decisions are made that have an uncertain outcome. It can also point to mechanisms of control relating to what ought (or ought not) to be known. ¹ Nonknowledge will therefore be referred to when discussing the experimental strategies involved in advancing towards a post-fossil fuel and (hopefully) renewable energy society along with the inevitable knowledge gaps they entail.

One crucial issue associated with such experimental processes is that in many theoretical conceptualizations of the energy transition, there has been no clear focus on the connection between energy sources and the socioeconomic development of societies. From the first Industrial Revolution onwards, the use of fossil fuels has been closely interrelated with the development of high energy societies in terms of production and consumption. Lewis Mumford (1934) distinguished between the pre-industrial (or “eco-technological”) state of early industrial society based on the utilization of energy from plant crops, wood, and hydropower and the “neo-technical” state of high industrialization in which electrical energy flows through all parts of society.

The present challenge is to effect a sociotechnical transition to a low energy society based on alternative energies and sustainable patterns of consumption. Whereas the first industrial experiment was a fossil fuel revolution, the “next great experiment” will need to be based on a sociotechnical transition to renewable energy use. The book will therefore discuss theoretical approaches that address the stabilization as well as the destabilization and transformation of sociotechnical systems. This will be linked to current debates on energy conflicts and the culturally rooted specificities of people’s acceptance of renewable energy. Studies conducted since the 1970s have shown that although novel technologies may increase the efficiency of energy throughput, actual reductions in energy use are dependent on what may sometimes be tiny differences in culturally rooted practices. They depend, for example, on the everyday habitual practices of users rooted in different kinds of personal relationships within the household (see Bartiaux and Salmón 2014, Brand 2010, Shove 2004, Wilhit...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• 1 Introduction: the next great experiment
• 2 Energy and society: energetic foundations of sociology
• 3 Contemporary social theories of energy transitions
• 4 Wind, solar, and biomass in sociotechnical transition
• 5 Renewable energy from below the ground
• 6 Political regulation and new forms of environmental governance
• 7 Energies in conflict: new restraints and old obstacles
• 8 Integrating renewable energies into existing electricity systems
• 9 Conclusion: nonknowledge and exnovation as progress
• References
• Index