Integrated modelling and ontologies of energy futures: The decarbonisation of maritime transport

Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) represent an increasingly prominent tool in the governance of energy transitions. While scholars have often pointed to the dissonance between IAMs and the empirical realities they claim to project, studies of how integrated energy modelling interacts with the power relations of energy governance have been relatively scarce. Drawing on literature in Science and Technology Studies, this article explores how IAMs function in the broader relations of power and expertise that govern energy transitions, focusing on the transition to alternative fuels in maritime transport as an illustrative case. More specifically, the article demonstrates that integrated energy modelling anchors and is embedded in broad and complex structures of practices through which ontologies of energy futures are created. It shows that existing literature has adopted too narrow a perspective on the ways integrated energy modelling enacts power relations, concluding that the practices through which models are constructed and reach their audiences should be collapsed together into a single analytical frame.