Investigating energy infrastructure through the low carbon challenge: technologies, governance and socio-spatial effects

Abstract

In its 2022 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reiterated the increasingly severe, interconnected and often irreversible impacts of climate change, emphasising the urgency of immediate action, with particular focus on the rapid transformation of energy infrastructure (IPCC, 2022). Such calls for new, expanded and environmentally sustainable energy infrastructure exemplify what Bridge et al. labelled as our contemporary ‘infrastructural moment’ (Bridge et al., 2018, p. 9). Political, economic and environmental voices have exhorted the considerable scale of the infrastructural investment required, with climate emergency narratives intertwining with earlier positioning of infrastructure spending as a response to the 2008 financial crises (Feindt & Cowell, 2010) and, more recently, to the coronavirus pandemic (Johnson, 2020). Rhetorics of speed, scale and necessity inform policy discourses dominated – at least in national and corporate arenas – by delivery. Yet, transitioning to a net zero-emissions energy system is a hugely complex task requiring a holistic appraisal of how energy is generated, transferred and utilised across all forms of infrastructure. The importance of examining and better understanding infrastructures, their obduracy, renewal and change, across the globe, has never been more acute. It is estimated that around 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions stem from infrastructure (Crouch, 2021). What is more, infrastructure has to be resilient to the climate change that is already happening and still to come. This ‘infrastructural moment’ has produced much interest across the social sciences, keen to grasp how energy infrastructure co-evolves with socio-economic institutions, actors and social norms (Calvert, 2016). Such perspectives are vital, since infrastructure is not just an entity to be delivered, or an ‘asset class’ to be packaged neatly for economic gain. Infrastructural systems deeply infuse patterns of production and consumption; they require governance and simultaneously configure how governing might be undertaken; and infrastructure provides an analytical window – an ontology – through which societal struggles to achieve energy transitions can be observed and appraised (Sovacool et al., 2020). Several broad themes have attracted the attention of researchers. The first centres on issues of technology and technology choice. Debate about the respective merits of ‘centralized’ versus ‘decentralized’ energy pathways are well established (Lovins, 1977), and analysts have escaped these dualistic oppositions to engage with the myriad hybrid permutations of scalar form. However, disputes about the merits of alternative future technological pathways for energy decarbonisation play out in the context of extant infrastructural systems. Infrastructures, and their constitutive networks of actors, facilities and institutions, are both the subject and battleground of future technological choices. Consequently, new challenges emerge in reconciling ‘decentralised’ regimes of provision with energy infrastructures that are spatially integrated and interconnected at wider scales (Goldthau, 2014). Equally important, though less studied, is how dominant, centralised infrastructural systems accommodate new technologies, and re-shape or attenuate any decentralising potential. The second theme concerns the socio-spatial effects of infrastructure. There is a rich seam of social science research that understands energy infrastructure as simultaneously socio-material and technical systems – deeply intertwined with the structure of society –with the capacity therefore to organise social as well as ecological relations. Various analysts have charted how energy infrastructures shape social and spatial differentials in economic and environmental outcomes (Graham & Marvin, 2001). The particular agentic effects of