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Part I
Large-scale energy system transformations
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1 Introduction
Visions for sustainable energy transformations
Just after sunset, I am sitting outdoors at a cafĂ© on the FriedrichstraĂe in Berlin waiting for dinner. As I look around me, I see all of the trappings of modernity on this commercial, cosmopolitan street. Nearby there is an H&M outlet, a Starbucks cafĂ©, a Hugo Boss store, and the Westin Grand hotel. I hear bustling traffic and crowds of people speaking various languages, and the U-Bahn electric train rumbles below. As the sunlight fades, signs and streetlights begin to illuminate this modern âGreat White Way,â a term that described the worldâs first electrified streets. I imagine how much the FriedrichstraĂe has changed throughout its storied history. The new Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church is a half-mile from here, standing amid the ruins of the original 1890 church that was mostly destroyed in intense bombing during World War II. As recently as 1989, the Berlin Wall divided the street separating East from West Berlin, and the memory of the wall remains in the brick line that bisects the city. Checkpoint Charlie was active just down the street. As my thoughts return from the Berlin of the past to the present, I begin thinking of my recent interview with a consultant who is part of a group of investors seeking to build a Mediterranean-wide electricity grid and to export solar energy from the Sahara Desert to Europe. As I look around at the lights forming constellations in the city, I find myself wondering what this would all look like if such a vision were to come to pass. In fact, what would it look like if the entire Mediterranean region were powered with Saharan power? And what effects would an energy vision that stiches together areas encompassing broad power and wealth disparities have in other regions of the globe?
While it is dark now here in Berlin, the late-afternoon sun is still shining on the site of a solar power plant under construction in rural Morocco. Some imagine that the electrons generated at that site could be transmitted underneath the Mediterranean and across Europe to light the streetlights in front of me on the FriedrichstraĂe. It occurs to me that very little would look different here, yet much would change as a behemoth, complex system would be constructed to make Berlinâs Great White Way come to life at night with renewable energy from the desert sun rather than from the burning of coal and the fissioning of uranium. I envision a sea of mirrors glimmering against an imagined backdrop of empty sand dunes in the Sahara Desert, making the desert blossom with green electrons. This dream is not new, but has been dreamt for over a century.
Six months later, I wander through the village of Tasselmante just south of the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco. My colleague remarks that this is an idyllic place. The mountain air smells fresh, and there is not a cloud in the sky. Children play in the street. Palm trees glisten in the oasis, and the village is nearly silent. There are ruins of a kasbah in the middle of the village, a testimony to the 3,000-year history of the Amazigh (Berber) dynasties in this area. Despite this peaceful scene, these are not empty sand dunesâOuarzazate, a city of over 100,000 people, is only about 10 miles away, and the broader Province of Ouarzazate is home to a fast-growing population of almost 300,000.
A woman in a pink traditional djellaba (robe) pulling brackish water up from a rudimentary well in the village center invites us to talk with her. Clean drinking water is a long walk from here. I climb up the berm on the side of the village and see the beginnings of construction on the worldâs largest solar power plant just a stoneâs throw away. I wondered, what would the outcomes be for social and ecological justice if the power system were globalized to bring together disparate places, such as the commercial center of East Berlin with its storied past and a small village at the door of the Sahara that lacks clean drinking water? And what are the broader implications for sustainable development for large-scale solar power?
The context: visions for transnational renewable energy systems
Electrical grids are âcritical infrastructureâ in the industrialized world, driving economies supporting modern life (Farrell, Zerriffi, & Dowlatabadi, 2004). Electricity powers the production of materials and goods, the operation of the Internet, the provision of water, household appliances, and the production and transportation of food. At the nation-state scale, energy is a strategic resource relating to geopolitics and power, but also a source of socioeconomic development. At the local scale, access to electricity improves human capabilities through services such as lighting, refrigeration, water filtration, and heating and cooling.
At the same time, climate change mitigation is largely an energy problem, and greenhouse gas emissions from dirty electricity generation contribute substantially to increasing global temperature, as well as local air and water pollution and public health effects. This requires countries to shift their electrical power systems from fossil fuel sources to renewable electricity sources, such as sun and wind. These are not matters of mere technological substitution, but instead have significant human and social dimensions, relating to the ways in which nation-states and citizens imagine what an ideal future would be. Although it is often assumed that renewable energy will de facto obviate the social, political, and justice problems fossil fuels cause and therefore will be intrinsically sustainable, this study illustrates that this is not the case. Rather, sustainability must be intentionally planned in energy system design. A transition has the potential to negatively affect peopleâs lives, displacing workers from the fossil fuel industry, rewriting geographies from large central station power plants to sprawling solar and wind facilities, bypassing marginalized communities, and inequitably distributing costs through subsidies that disproportionately benefit upper-income communities. Sustainable energy policy requires a higher standard than generating electrons for the sake of electrons or than climate change mitigation alone. Instead, it requires an improvement in the capacity of people to secure their human rights, to sustain what they value, and to chart a path to human thriving, fostering what Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen and Jollands (2013) call âdeep energy security.â
Interdependent renewable electricity systems are being envisioned that require partnership, integration, and negotiation among developed and developing countries, pairing the challenge of building sustainable energy systems with the complexity of North-South cooperation. This book explores how actors separated by broad power and wealth disparities and heterogeneous energy needs envision regional sociotechnical systems and the technologies embedded within them. It asks how actors and nation-states envision what a sustainable and a âgoodâ energy system would look like. An exploration of visions for electricity systems illustrates the values and goals underpinning competing dreams for energy futures and their anticipated outcomes.
After the Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident in 1986, physicist Gerhard Knies dreamed of safer large-scale sources of energy. He made a back-of-the-envelope calculation finding that âwithin six hours deserts receive more energy from the sun than humankind consumes within a yearâ (http://www.desertec.org). Because 90% of the world lives within 1,800 miles of a desert, and since high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission lines can transmit electricity with losses of only 3% over 1,000 kilometers, he calculated that the world could be powered by renewable energy from deserts.
Building on this idea, from 2008 to 2015 an ambitious vision for a renewable electricity system unfolded in the Mediterranean region. This vision would entail building dozens of large-scale solar and wind power plants, mostly in North Africa; interconnecting the somewhat fragmented transmission infrastructure of 38 Mediterranean countries; and linking North Africa to the European Union (EU) through undersea transmission cables to develop a power system fueled almost exclusively by renewable energy. As detailed in this book, multiple versions of the Desertec vision were developed. One of several organizations known for promoting this vision, the Desertec Industrial Initiative (Dii), is a limited-liability company and a conglomerate of companies that at its peak reached 56 shareholder and partner companies. The novelty and complexity of Diiâs organizational structure and network rivaled the novelty and complexity of its vision, and this is in addition to the numerous actors promoting similar regional electricity systems worldwide.
Morocco is also an important country in this vision, butâmore importantlyâit is a strategic site for understanding renewable energy scale-up and energy security in developing countries. Morocco is committed to developing 10 gigawatts (GW) of solar and wind power by 2030 and is interested in regional renewable energy integration. Morocco has charted an ambitious path for renewable energy that illustrates the reasons that developing countries might pursue clean energy as part of a socioeconomic development strategy. Construction is well underway on the Noor-Ouarzazate solar power facility near the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco, which, when complete, will be the largest concentrating solar power plant worldwide. Noor provides important lessons for understanding the effects of large-scale solar power on local villages and for understanding how power plant siting would affect the energy justice dynamics of the regional system.
The intended audience of this book includes sustainability and sustainable development scholars, international relations scholars interested in energy, scholars interested in the societal and ethical dimensions of science and technology, energy policy and sustainable development practitioners, and students studying climate change and renewable energy. My aim is to write accessibly about complex and wide-reaching topics.
The challenge of envisioning and designing sustainable energy systems
This book contributes to two themes. The first is the role of the future in electricity systems: How actors imagine the future and integrate it with the past, and how people envision a transition to future sustainable electricity systems, particularly across nation-state lines. This visioning process plays an important role in social and technological innovation and in shaping the electrical power systems of the future. The second theme is the relationship between energy systems and sustainable development, particularly socially sustainable development. As the goals for electrical power systems expand from powering cities to empowering human development, this book explores the energy justice aspects of changes in energy systems.
Socio-energy systems: Crucial to understanding the societal and policy significance of energy transitions is conceiving of electrical power systems not as technological systems but as sociotechnical systems. Sociotechnical systems theory examines the co-shaping of the hardware of the system, (e.g., power plants, transmission lines, transformers), as well as the political, social, and institutional aspects of systems, (e.g., regulatory institutions, political frameworks, activist groups, citizens, engineers, and financiers). Analyzing sociotechnical systems requires understanding both the material techno-economic aspects of electricity and the less tangible socioinstitutional aspects, including actors, norms, visions, and values (Sovacool & Geels, 2016).
Historians who studied the electrification of Western countries laid the groundwork for this approach (see, for example, Glaser, 2009; Hughes, 1983; Nye, 1990; Rose, 1995; Tobey, 1996). Hughes (1983) first argued that electrical power systems are better characterized as sociotechnical systems, as they are shaped by economics, politics and political institutions, and geography. These systems develop within exercises of power to reflect the interests, values, and politics of powerful actors. Therefore, technological standardsâsuch as the frequency of the transmission networkâare influenced by political and social factors; they are not established for technical reasons alone. Hughes viewed electricity systems as groupings of interacting parts arranged in a network configuration, parts which have historically been centrally controlled and hierarchically arranged (Hughes, 1983). The system exerts an influence on its environment (e.g., on communities, landscapes, institutions) and is also shaped by its environment (e.g., by geography, major events, policies) (ibid.). Hughesâs comparison among three countries illustrates that the electricity system is a âcultural artifactâ influenced by the technological style of each individual country. Hughes describes âsystem buildersâ as critical actors in the construction of electrical power systems who possessed both the technological acumen to invent new technologies and the business and networking prowess to develop a system into which these new technologies would be integrated. I refer to the actors working today to reimagine and reshape electricity systems as system imaginers.
As the system advances in this exercise of social and mechanical power, it achieves substantial momentum with mass, speed, and direction (Hughes, 1983). Once systems have achieved momentum, also termed path dependence or technological lock-in, they are remarkably difficult to change (Arthur, 1994; Hughes, 1994). Historically, a major event, such as a world war, has been required to transform such systems (Hughes, 1983). However, an intentionally governed energy transition could perhaps occur without such a momentum-breaking event because of todayâs explicit policy and social goals governing transitions (Kern & Rogge, 2016).
Transforming these systems is a central policy challenge of our time. Geels and collaborators developed the âmulti-level perspectiveâ on sociotechnical transitions to sustainability, which focuses on innovation-driven change in systems. Geels (2004) conceives of ânichesâ as incubators in which radical innovations develop and potentially carve out a place in the system. However, it is difficult for new technologies to break into a path-dependent system (Verbong & Geels, 2007). Another body of work focuses on systems transitions enacted on the basis of the choices that policymakers and citizens make among various energy technologies (Meadowcroft, 2009; Perkins, 2017). Miller, Richter, and OâLeary (2015) borrow from sociotechnical systems theory to define âsocio-energy systemsâ as âa way of recognizing that energy systems involve the work, behavior, and choices of many different kinds of peopleâ (p. 30). A third body of work focuses on change evoked by a visioning process that ultimately results in material reconfigurations, as discussed later.
Imaginaries and visions for sociotechnical systems: In todayâs knowledge societies, large-scale sociotechnical systemsâ evolution is often guided by a distinct and systematic visioning phase for specific technologies and systems, as well as broader imaginaries for how technological progress relates to social progress. Jasanoff and Kim (2015) define sociotechnical imaginaries as âcollectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attain...
