We are inviting abstracts for the IAG 2024 in Adelaide for our session on Energy Geography and Renewable Energy.
Energy Geography and Renewable Energy
Organised by: Gareth Bryant (USyd) gareth.bryant@sydney.edu.au, James Goodman (UTS) James.Goodman@UTS.edu.au, Lisa Lumsden (Next Economy) l.lumsden@nexteconomy.com.au, Sophie Webber (USyd) sophie.webber@sydney.edu.au
Sponsored by the Economic Geography Study Group and the Nature, Risk and Resilience Study Group
Transitions from fossil fuels to renewable energy are multilevel and transformative. Energy is rescaled, from distributed and household contexts to new greenfield or ‘brownfield’ wind, solar and storage utilities, regional renewable development modelling, national planning frameworks and global energy and climate policy-making. There is extensive scale shifting by renewable energy corporates and financial institutions as well as by critical climate NGOs and activist networks, that often leverage variations in regulatory regimes or in commitments to decarbonisation. Drivers of transition can be complementary, as ‘co-benefits’, but they can also collide. Much of the renewable sector is privately owned, albeit dependent on state authority, and the priority of maintaining investor returns can take precedence over emissions reduction. Efforts at maximising returns in neoliberal renewables can exacerbate social divisions, negate community or livelihood benefit and prevent wider democratic participation, involvement or social ownership. All these aspects pose problems for renewable energy legitimacy, driving new contestations and new forms of claim-making, including for social ownership and for socio-ecological priorities to take precedence over corporate interests. We seek papers that address how people interpret these and related transitions, how lives are re-ordered and how the meaning and potential of places is thereby transformed. We are especially interested in how the new socio-ecological geographies of energy can be generative, producing new capacity for climate agency and decarbonisation.
Interested presenters should send (no more than) 250-word abstracts, with title, keywords, authors and contact information to the session organisers by Friday March 22. We will notify accepted papers before the IAG deadline.
Cover image: Illustration by Matt Rota for The Transnational Institute
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