## **Digitisation and Low-Carbon Energy Transitions**

*Edited by* **Siddharth Sareen Katja Müller**

#### Digitisation and Low-Carbon Energy Transitions

"With the arrival of the European Commission's Twin Transition trope, the future will see no shortage of hubristic accounts on digitisation and low-carbon energy transitions. As a welcome antidote, this book brings together refreshing, provocative, ethnographic contributions that tease out the paradoxes, tensions and emancipatory potential in this twin transition."

—Professor Lars Coenen, *Western Norway University of Applied Sciences & University of Oslo*

"Our energy systems are being digitised. Decarbonisation is the goal. But as this book illustrates, rewiring society involves complex cultural circuitry."

—Adrian Smith, *Professor of Technology & Society, Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex*

Siddharth Sareen · Katja Müller Editors

# Digitisation and Low-Carbon Energy Transitions

*Editors*  Siddharth Sareen University of Stavanger Stavanger, Norway

University of Bergen Bergen, Norway

Katja Müller Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg Halle, Germany

University of Technology Sydney Ultimo, NSW, Australia

ISBN 978-3-031-16707-2 ISBN 978-3-031-16708-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16708-9

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2023. This book is an open access publication. **Open Access** This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan

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### **Acknowledgements**

The authors wish to acknowledge generous funding from the University of Stavanger, the University of Bergen, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and the University of Konstanz, which enabled open access publication of this book as a whole and specific chapters by Siddharth Sareen, Zane Datava, Marius Korsnes, Tomas Skjølsvold and Eva Riedke. Funding for the Just Mobility Transitions Network (JUSTMOBNET) from UH-nett Vest made the art exhibition and book workshop at the Norwegian Petroleum Museum possible, supplemented by sponsorship from the European Association of Social Anthropologists and the Responsive Organising for Low Emission Societies (ROLES) project grant 321421, the latter funded by the Research Council of Norway and JPI Climate. We acknowledge the Energy Anthropology Network, which the editors co-convene, for bringing us together.

### **Contents**

### **Notes on Contributors**

**Aggeliki Aggeli** is a postdoctoral researcher in the Sustainable Cities and Everyday Practice group of Aalborg University Copenhagen. She has international research, teaching and architecture practice experience. She is currently working on household engagement of EU transitions projects, and on issues of gender and diversity in relation to smart technologies.

**Zane Datava** is a Ph.D. candidate at the Centre for Technology and Society, NTNU. Her background is in Social Anthropology (M.A) and Arts and Culture Studies (B.A.). Her Ph.D. project is entitled 'Innovation, engagement, and justice across the life cycle: a socio-technical analysis of resource flows serving Nordic mobility transitions'.

**Darcie DeAngelo** is an assistant professor of socio-cultural anthropology at Oklahoma University. Her research focuses on human-nonhuman relations in the aftermath of war. Dedicated to public scholarship along with academic work, she produces multi-modal and filmic exhibitions from her ethnographic research. She serves as a co-editor-in-chief of the *Journal Visual Anthropology Review*.

**Aurore Flipo** is a researcher at ENTPE at the University of Lyon and an associate researcher at PACTE at the University of Grenoble. Since 2014, she holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Sciences-Po in Paris on intra-European migration. She continues to research mobility and how different forms interact with social stratification.

**Marius Korsnes** is a researcher at the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture at NTNU, and leads a research area on deep decarbonisation and wide societal change in the Norwegian Centre for Energy Transition Strategies. He also works on community building, and explores how meat is embedded in food practices.

**Mette Mechlenborg** has a profound knowledge on homemaking, and everyday practices in a cross-interdisciplinary research field at the Southern University of Denmark, School of Design and Aalborg University. She has more than 90 publications, including books and numerous peer-reviewed articles and reports on everyday practices, consumption, gender and home.

**Katja Müller** (Dr. habil.) is a social anthropologist with research interests in environmental and energy humanities, extractivism and transition studies, as well as digital anthropology, material culture, museum and visual anthropology. She is Privatdozentin for social anthropology at MLU Halle and Visiting Professor at UTS Sydney.

**Nathalie Ortar** is a senior researcher in anthropology at the Laboratoire Aménagement Economie Transports, or ENTPE, at the University of Lyon. Her research interests focus on the meaning of dwelling as well as on the consequences of energy transition in daily life and its moral and symbolic implications.

**Eva Riedke** is a postdoctoral researcher in the Division of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Konstanz. She engages with off-grid solar home systems—from their design in Germany to their use in rural Kenya—exploring the energy futures that solar entrepreneurs envision for themselves and others.

**Siddharth Sareen** is an associate professor in energy and environment at the University of Stavanger and an associate professor II at the Centre for Climate and Energy Transformation in Bergen. His research addresses the governance of energy transitions, from bustling cities to extractive zones, examining how changing energy infrastructure impacts social equity.

**Tomas Skjølsvold** is a professor at the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture at NTNU. His key research interests are society-wide transformations and transitions. He aims to understand broadly how such transitions unfold, and further, how one can work to make such transitions as democratic, inclusive and responsible as possible.

**A. Sørensen** is a PhD fellow in the Technologies in Practice research group at the IT University of Copenhagen. Drawing on anthropology and STS, Sørensen researches questions about age, generation and digitally mediated knowledge related to the climate crisis, empirically focusing on young climate activists in Norway's oil-capital Stavanger.

**Emile St-Pierre** is a Ph.D. student in anthropology at the Graduate School of Human Sciences at Osaka University. He graduated from Concordia University in Montreal in 2017 with an M.A. in Social and Cultural Analysis. His research concerns socio-technical change in Hokkaido's energy infrastructure as it increases renewable energy output.

### **List of Figures**

#### **Contested Energy Futures in Hokkaido: Speculating with European Renewable Energy Models**

Tanenhaus) 109

### **List of Exhibition Figures**

#### **Digitisation and Low-Carbon Energy Transitions**

#### **Just Low-Carbon Mobility Transitions: A Research-Based Art Exhibition**

#### **A Solar Off-Grid Software: The Making of Infrastructures, Markets and Consumers 'Beyond Energy'**

#### **Contested Energy Futures in Hokkaido: Speculating with European Renewable Energy Models**

#### **Overcoming Abstraction: Affectual States in the Efforts to Decarbonize Energy Among Young Climate Activists in Stavanger, Norway**

#### **A New Reflexive Turn: Glitches, Carbon Footprints, and Streaming Videos in Visual Anthropology**

#### **The Hidden Energies of Work Digitisation: A View from France Through the Use of Coworking Spaces**

#### **Littering the City or Freedom of Mobility? The Case of Electric Scooters**

#### **Mediatised Practices: Renovating Homes with Media and ICTs in Australia**

Exhibition Fig. 9 Displays of iconic electric bus rollouts exhibited within the museum (*Source* Rune Egenes and Norwegian Petroleum Museum [used with permission]) 169

### **Digitisation and Low-Carbon Energy Transitions**

**Katja Müller and Siddharth Sareen**

### **Introduction1**

As the world faces the urgent challenge of transitioning to low-carbon energy futures, digitisation gains salience: decarbonising energy systems requires the digital process control of energy production, transmission

K. Müller

Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Halle, Germany

University of Technology Sydney, Broadway, NSW, Australia

S. Sareen (B) Department of Media and Social Sciences, University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
Centre for Climate and Energy Transformation & Department of Geography, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

1 Note on authorship: The authors are equal contributors to this introductory chapter.

and end-use. Decarbonising electricity and electrifying diverse sectors requires real-time digital coordination of increasingly distributed energy production, with growing numbers and variations of power plants and enhanced spatiotemporal complexity. To manage energy demand, raise energy efficiency and enable rapid renewable energy rollout, digital devices can help recursively modulate the rhythms of energy and society. This synchronised shift in energy practices and infrastructures—for whose enablement digitisation is crucial—is essential for the rapid decarbonisation of complex, intertwined systems.

Simultaneously, low-carbon energy transitions premised on electrification and digitisation carry the risk of significant increases in energy demand, systemic and individual vulnerabilities, and further concentration of centralised control, with the benefits of increased energy efficiency accruing to a narrow set of privileged actors who set the pace and scale of low-carbon transitions to maximise their self-interest rather than public gain. This raises questions of political economy about the twin transition of digitisation and low-carbon transitions. Who digitises energy infrastructure, and what drives decision-making? How does governance impact the justice effects of infrastructural change? How does digitisation condition the lived experience of human interactions with evolving energy systems? In sum, what is lost and gained as we transition from fossil fuel-dominated infrastructures to hybrid-digitised energy futures, from coal mining to data mining?

#### **Energy Efficiency and Greenhouse Gas Emission Reduction**

In times of climate crisis, digitisation and energy form a coalition not only for economic savings, but for *energy efficiency*, indirectly aimed at reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Approaching the twin transition from the energy side, this implies that the climate crisis drives a shift to renewable sources in energy production, and this transition in turn requires a digitisation of the whole energy system. Digitisation is important to ensure grid stability as the variability, scale and distribution of energy sources increase, and the distinction between consumer and producer becomes less binary and begins to fade. Renewable energy production is concomitant with the decentralisation and fragmentation of power production units, and requires digital coordination of grids that operate across regional and (trans)national scales. In other words, digitisation enables rapid acceleration and widespread adoption of more granular technology (i.e. small-scale, modular, replicable and scalable units) in a low-carbon energy production system (Wilson et al. 2020), and sectoral digitisation can lower transmission losses. Renewable energy systems hence become established as ones where digitisation, decarbonisation and decentralised sources are closely interwoven (Di Silvestre et al. 2018).

The climate aspect has been intensely studied in the field of sustainability transitions, where low-carbon transitions have been conceptualised in depth and at breadth, and scientists envision the current scholarly task as 'discerning the nature of the future "stage" into which we are hurtling and understanding clearly how people are experiencing and understanding this unprecedented energy transition' to low-carbon and lower net energy use systems (Love and Isenhour 2016, p. 15). Yet, conceptions of energy transitions that explicitly include digitisation are still emergent, as are in-depth analyses of the same that take the situatedness of systems and the processual dynamics of changes into view. While Blondeel et al. (2021, p. 11) point out that digitisation, especially through smart grids, is 'radically transforming the interconnectivity, reliability and efficiency of the energy system', an understanding of twin transition dynamics remains in its infancy.

This is surprising given that digitisation in general is hardly new to power plants, these being at the production side of energy systems, where supply-side interactions with wholesale energy markets have long been digitised. Conventional power plant and grid operators may not necessarily be convinced about digitising additional upstream and downstream units, but feel increased pressure to bite the bullet when decentralising energy production aligns with attempts at energy autarky (see St-Pierre in this book). The considerations, implementation and consequences linked to digitising the *electricity sector* (also see IEA 2017, 77f ) are ominously relevant for national governments, as they varyingly emphasise or overlook emergent threats to critical energy infrastructure with changing system and data architectures.

Energy consumption and end-use, too, emphasise digitisation as a means for energy efficiency and GHG emission reduction, most often through the use of smart meters and dynamic electricity tariffs for demand response (Geelen et al. 2019; Hmielowski et al. 2019). However, climate mitigation through energy savings and efficiency can become a sidelined ideal during digital advances (see Ortar and Flipo in this book). Furthermore, efficiency is not only relevant for the electricity sector. It also induces changes in the *building and transport sectors*, where energy efficiency renovation and low-carbon modes of transport either compete to prevail, or struggle to synergise, within locked-in political economies (see Aggeli and Mechlenborg, and Datava et al. in this book).

#### **Data Generation and Rebound Effects**

Considering socio-political aspects of technological interlinkages in digitising low-carbon energy systems can also advance an understanding of wider (energy) justice outcomes and human capabilities (Hillerbrand et al. 2021). The twin transition impacts labour, both in terms of evolving work practices and with respect to the global movement of bodies for economic production, as digitisation and robotisation transform the global economy (Stakanov and Ukhova 2020). Furthermore, the digital in the twin transition is not a mere consequence of ideals of decarbonising electricity, but co-constitutes the transition's ontological basis. Analyses of *digital data generation and circulation* provide insights into the need for rapid and deep reductions in GHG emissions as well as countervailing trends (see Sørensen in this book). Data generation and online data circulation likewise precede and enable energy efficiency improvements in the building sector (see, for example, Aggeli and Mechlenborg in this book), and have become prerequisites for various sectors and energy systems in general. Power generation and energy use that enhance efficiency and accelerate low-carbon transitions through digital means are premised on digital data generation and information flow.

However, digital data generation and retrieval come at a cost—an energy cost. The production and circulation of digital data consumes electricity, and as data volumes and server storage and processing capacities burgeon, so do energy demands. By 2019, digital technologies were already responsible for 3.7% of all global GHG emissions (Shift Project 2019: p. 4), twice what civil aviation accounts for, mainly driven by increased video use and short lifespans of digital equipment. However, energy efficiency in data processing has undergone a parallel increase by an order of magnitude; hence, while data processing rose by 500% during 2010–2018, electricity consumption for processing only increased 6% (Masanet et al. 2020). Albeit laudable, this decoupling of the rise of the digital and its energy requirements nonetheless fails to circumvent increasing energy demand, and is undergirded by a logic of growth. As a potentially worrying trend, the expansive development and installation of digital devices in and beyond the energy sector looks set to continue, rather than the *decrease* in overall energy consumption that is required to address the climate crisis. Rather than ignoring these developments in the hope that future energy efficiency enhancement will outpace growing energy demand, some stakeholders—like the visual artists and anthropologists taking to 'glitchy', low-resolution videos (DeAngelo in this book)—are reconfiguring their practices and lenses accordingly, while others—like the German company developing solar energy apps for the Kenyan market (Riedke in this book)—remain largely undiscerning in this respect.

*Rebound effects* of energy efficiency or GHG emission savings through digitisation are theoretically possible in numerous cases. They are evident when the energy to produce devices such as e-scooters (which can have notably short lifespans) are taken into account (see Datava et al. in this book); when online communication and information searches outpace energy savings in refurbishment (Aggeli and Mechlenborg in this book); or when the energy used to drive to shared working spaces exceeds the savings in energy that arise from the co-occupancy of spatial resources (Ortar and Flipo in this book). Rebound effects—and the impact of digitisation on energy saving—vary severely across technologies and applications as they are specific to technologies and practices; e.g. drone delivery is subject to relatively low potential to lower energy demand, whereas smart thermostats have high potential to enable virtuous declines in energy demand (IEA 2017, p. 30). Yet again, even if energy use associated with producing and operating a given device is low, rebound effects can lead to increased overall consumption due to lower costs e.g. setting the temperature for digitally controlled heating higher and thereby diminishing or reversing the energy savings that result from sensorily captured, presence-dependent heating (see Horner et al. 2016 for details). Likewise, automated transport can improve energy efficiency, but reduced costs can also spur a greater tendency for personal car use.

This book centres and problematises these emergent problems of inter-linking digitisation and transitions to low-carbon energy systems. Through an interdisciplinary set of chapters, it transgresses boundaries between energy anthropology (Abram et al. 2019; Smith and High 2017), energy geographies (Huber 2015; Calvert 2016) and longerrunning fields such as science and technology studies, political ecology and (digital) media studies. All featured contributions are based on ethnographies of digitisation and low-carbon energy transitions, and thus analyse ideals and processes of the twin transition without constraining focus to energy systems in a technical sense, instead taking on the full import of what 'socio-technical' implies. Rather than remaining on the theoretical level of what digitisation and low-carbon energy transition may encompass, they take to the situatedness of transition processes and their realisation in particular cases, and analyse this based on profound insights. Such a point of departure offers not only case studies of the twin transitions, replete with their challenges and glitches, but enables an inductive approach that allows for theoretical development derived from empirical insights. The authors of these chapters pay attention to the specificities of digitisation, broadly construed and ethnographically explored. In myriad ways, they deal with questions of power, hierarchy and decision-making. Notably, privacy and security emerge as crosscutting themes that loom large at the intersection of power production and transmission with digital control and regulation, and interpellate the aforementioned core concerns of energy efficiency, GHG emissions, data generation and its rebound effects.

The contributions feature particular attention to the situatedness of transition processes. While digitisation and the climate crisis are by now global conditions that affect planetary health, their manifestations are strongly dependent on place-based infrastructures and socio-cultural as well as political economic frameworks. By drawing on case studies from Europe and Japan, as well as from Kenya and Australia, the contributions cover a larger spectrum of transitions worldwide, while maintaining a primary focus on the Global North, where these twin transitions have arguably made the most major advances globally thus far.

The contributions were prepared—and then revised both in advance of and subsequent to—the Energy Anthropology Network's biannual workshop, hosted by the University of Stavanger in August 2021. This convened academics conducting research on energy transitions and digitisation from anthropology as well as from a host of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives. The transgression of disciplinary boundaries is symptomatic of both energy studies and digitisation studies, and is richly in evidence here. This book resolutely assembles contributions that take anthropological case studies as their foundation, but allows for diverse methodological approaches (from field research to digital anthropology and from interviews to desk-based analyses),2 varying writing conventions (e.g. thick description or the use of illustrative examples), and diverse canons that researchers draw upon (i.e. vantage points or theoretical approaches that may be well-established in one discipline, yet novel in another).

The book's chapters are enhanced and completed by a researchbased and co-produced art exhibition. The Rjukan Solarpunk Academy, comprising artists Martin Andersen and Margrethe Brekke, exhibited their visions and interpretations of just low-carbon energy transitions at the Norwegian Petroleum Museum during autumn 2021. 'Uro' is a veritable lucid dream or lucid interval-like installation of a broken-down fossil fuel powered car's parts suspended on an oil rig, complemented by the manifesto and technical details of a utopian National Association for Bus Users (rather than the prominent Norwegian Automobile

2 Pink et al. (2015) address the ontological and phenomenological concern for digital ethnography, reflecting that 'we are often in mediated contact with participants rather than in direct presence'. Introducing an edited collection, Douglas-Jones et al. (2021, p. 9) tackle this headon by calling for 'an anthropology of data that is ethnographically specific and theoretically ambitious' in its 'engagements with the data moment'.

Federation), artistically rendered and detailed on post-industrial tapestry. Images of the exhibition—stylistically, symbolically and daringly juxtaposed at a museum with a focus on petroleum related national history and culture—are featured after each chapter of this book, replete with a short overview of its research-related development (Chapter "Just Low-Carbon Mobility Transitions: A Research-Based Art Exhibition") following this introduction.

The diversity of disciplines represented in the chapters advances research on the twin transition by contributing to transition studies, energy studies and energy anthropology, and to a lesser extent to media studies and digital anthropology. Importantly, it constitutes a collective response that emerges across the interplay of case studies and conceptual approaches. Reading carefully through the case studies reveals how the study of digitisation and energy transition is enriched by engaging with the actual places in which change happens; by treating change as an intertwined set of infrastructural transformations (including seemingly banal ones); and by mobilising interdisciplinary concepts and methods. The common grounds embodied by these book chapters lead us to mainframe two concepts for ethnographic study of the twin transition: *situating digitisation* and *realising imaginaries*.

#### **Situating digitisation**

Digitisation holds transformative potential that can be for the better or worse, depending on how it is shaped through engagement with particular contexts, and how it is translated through regulatory regimes that are themselves evolving to anticipate and grapple with rapid infrastructural change. In an edited collection, Prainsack (2020, p. 444) highlights the need for:

'visions and instruments to build new institutions: institutions in and through which human expertise, experience, and interaction are seen as equally important as high-tech precision; where new norms and policy instruments ensure that the benefits of data use accrue for society at large, and in particular for the marginalised and vulnerable; and where the datafication of the bodies, lives, and practices of people who have no realistic chance to opt out is recognised and condemned for what it is: robotic brutality', which Chisnall (2020, p. 488) posits as 'a new form of digital enslavement that has the potential to curtail liberty and cause harm'.

Bareis and Katzenbach (2021b, a) argue that national strategies anchored in diverse socio-cultural contexts and political economies performatively lock in a prominent aspect of digitisation, artificial intelligence (AI), as 'inevitable and massively disrupting', and then channel investment to particular technological futures and thus co-produce them. Smith and Fressoli (2021) confront 'future essentialism' by advocates of automation, and argue for a focus on how automating technologies are being hacked, subverted and appropriated to foster conviviality, as a means to inspire a politics of what they call 'post-automation', which is premised on democratic deliberation and the cultivation of social capabilities. Drawing on ethnographic work with firefighters in Denmark, Karsten (2021, p. 92) emphasises the need to guard against the misunderstandings and incorrect applications that tend to accompany digitisation, and correspondingly proposes moving from resistance and apprehension to concern and dialogue (i.e. conviviality) to 'foster more empathetic, productive and understanding collaborations within and across organisations'.

Studying digitisation in Berlin, Quitzow and Rohde (2021) show how techno-optimism on digital solutions at the urban scale presents them as environmental solutions, economically essential, and linked with exciting experimentation and progress, thereby undermining other subtler as well as more radical alternatives. This determinative aspect of digitisation is evident in the rapid current transformation of countless aspects of social organisation, including academic publishing (Fortun and Fortun 2015). Indeed, Karasti et al. (2016) point out that the emergence of new data infrastructures is changing the nature of knowledge production, meaning that digitisation is not only a subject of study, but also an actant on how that study takes place. Knox (2021a, 2021b, p. 178) captures this ubiquitous aspect of digitisation by 'traversing the infrastructures of digital life', elucidating how it encompasses 'the wires and cables that support

mobile and computer communication but also the integration of sensors, databases of measurements, and real-time data analytics into buildings, motorways, ticketing services, fast food delivery, taxi services and more'.

The first three contributions of this book illustrate how energyrelated digitisation in its structure and diffusion is heavily dependent on the infrastructures of digital life, comprising both the digitisation segment—transport, energy production or communication—as well as the socio-cultural context and dislocations through which it unfolds. In Chapter "A Solar Off-Grid Software: The Making of Infrastructures, Markets and Consumers 'Beyond Energy'", Riedke offers an analysis of a new software to manage the sales of solar off-grid products. This software is being developed by a German start-up for the Kenyan market. Analysing the different layers of the software, Riedke renders tangible how humanitarian and environmental concerns intertwine with forprofit interests and the overarching aim to establish markets and new consumer subjects among 'off-grid' populations. These ambitions interpellate low-carbon electricity provision in the form of transnational social entrepreneurship, whereby digitised energy users are constructed as new market actors. The attendant advantages and disadvantages of their reconstituted subjecthood range from energy access on the one hand to becoming a market participant subject to neoliberal development agendas on the other hand, rendering people vulnerable to increased monitoring, data generation and control through the ensuing energy consumption and payment practices.

Alongside explicating datafication, marketisation and automation processes, attention to digitisation in specific contexts also foregrounds questions of realigning access and information policies, influencing knowledge economies, and adjusting participation and conventional power dynamics. Control is shifting from conventional process regulation (e.g. by engineers or newspaper offices) to those who programme digital system control with remote access through reading and writing rights (see e.g. Ernst 2009; Müller 2017). As digitisation in a narrow sense refers to transforming analogue data formats into digital formats based on binary codes, software and applications—attuned to preexisting programmes, needs and desires from a yet-to-be-digitised sector or segment—the software configuration determines future application options and possibilities to intervene, alter or rewrite programmes. Dominant ways of thinking including hegemonic market logics permeate digitally constituted systems that order and control critical processes, even as forms of counterculture such as open source software development or—with regard to user access—creative commons and open access policies rally against this development (Garcelon 2009; Risam 2019).

In this book, St-Pierre shows how such power mechanisms also figure in the grid protocols and in the realisation of virtual power plants. In Chapter "Contested Energy Futures in Hokkaido: Speculating with European Renewable Energy Models", St-Pierre shows that Japan's low-carbon energy future cannot yet draw on the digitisation required to regulate and control decentralised and diversified energy production, despite enhanced scrutiny of established energy systems and demand for more localised emergency-grid solutions rather than mainland dependency. Even though grid protocols prioritise less centralised renewable energy distribution and the Japanese experience with earthquakes and disasters—which St-Pierre exemplifies with the prefecture of Hokkaido—undergirds the twin transition, the idea of an ever-expanding, digitally regulated grid remains mediated between stakeholders at various governmental and administrative levels as they plan a society where the virtual and the physical increasingly intermesh, as evident in the disaster-proofing of energy production and distribution systems.

Unpacking digitisation in the wider sense of digital technology permeating every aspect of everyday life, a phenomenon commonly signified as *digitalisation*, entails recognising that the internet has profoundly altered information and knowledge systems. Neither the proclaimed internet optimism (Negroponte 1996) that anticipated the break-up of established hierarchies and the democratisation of societies through the internet, nor the internet pessimism that saw it as leading to a surrender of culture to technology (Postman 2011) hold sway; yet, internet communication and social media have reshaped the world (and the world has recursively shaped social media, see Miller et al. 2016) and continue to do so, with prominent, concerning impacts such as election outcomes (Schroeder 2018).

Sørensen's work in Chapter "Overcoming Abstraction: Affectual States in the Efforts to Decarbonize Energy Among Young Climate Activists in Stavanger, Norway", undergirds this by relating internet-based information and digitally based visualisation to energy systems and climate protests. Sørensen demonstrates both how the realisation of a post-fossil resource ideal can be highly problematic and conflictual in a society whose wealth has in large part relied on oil and gas production, and also how the visualisation of the intangible consequences of post-fossil futures depends on digital or digitally based technologies. Numbers, graphs and charts are required to make the climatic consequences of fossil fuel energy systems known and intelligible, making digitisation a prerequisite for future scenarios of altering extractive conventions. As a mode of communication, deliberation and proliferation of competing narratives, digitisation is ontologically baked into energy sector representations, as much as it is also integral to fossil fuel infrastructure such as oil rigs.

The section *Situating digitisation* thus foregrounds a framing of digitisation as context-dependent, with particular attention to its relation to energy production, distribution and consumption. This allows us to draw attention to the socio-cultural contexts of digitising energy systems, and to the intertwined nature of everyday digital practices, energy system configurations and low-carbon energy transition dynamics. Energy-related digitisation in its structure and diffusion is heavily dependent on both the digitisation segment—in transport, energy production or communication—as well as on social norms, hierarchies and expectations.

### **Realising Imaginaries**

It is not only the particular contexts and the situatedness of low-carbon energy transitions and digitisation processes that necessitate (and complicate) adjustments to the pace and mode of twin transitions, but also a variety of other challenges and hindrances related to practical implementation. A focus on realising imaginaries simultaneously envisions and problematises potential futures, foregrounding the conditions and dynamics of their prospective emergence.

As digitisation is ubiquitous, it is simultaneously established and emergent, well entrenched and fluid, established within everyday infrastructures (such as electric grids) and being rolled out in so far socially unfamiliar forms (as with the household electric smart meters required to enable smart grids). Imaginaries are instrumental to and powerful in advancing particular forms of digitisation and determining the terms on which these are institutionalised in wider settings, from ownership to functionality and from the pace of diffusion to the extent of technological proliferation. Jasanoff and Kim (2015) famously discuss how socio-technical imaginaries have been constructed to advance the project of modernity, a project that deeply colours digitisation. Jasanoff (2021) argues for humility rather than the hubris that strives for human control of the earth; the latter tendency contributes to the creation of what Gabrys (2016) calls 'program earth', a world constituted by ubiquitous, hyper-connected digitised technologies.

The realisation of imaginaries, however, usually rests somewhere in between humility and hubris, with good intentions of saving planet earth through digitising energy (related) systems routinely accompanied by severe side effects. DeAngelo in Chapter "A New Reflexive Turn: Glitches, Carbon Footprints, and Streaming Videos in Visual Anthropology", shows the discrepancy between increasing possibilities in digital work and ideals of reducing energy consumptions, but also how people tackle and solve this—at least partially. DeAngelo shows how video artwork—regardless of whether the artists substantively problematise environmental and energy issues in their art—constitutes a mode of dealing with the increasing energy requirements of digital art production and consumption. Some artists and visual anthropologists confront their carbon footprint by limiting resolution and establishing a different style, which simultaneously carries the advantage of partly bridging the digital divide to widen their reach. The resultant 'glitchy' videos in this interpretation reduce energy needs related to their own existence as art that is streamed and consumed, while also benefitting those with limited access to energy and online content. The novel focus on glitchiness underscores the gap between dominant imaginaries of digitisation as a sleek new innovation and its troubled, patchy reality across geographies of socio-material difference.

Ortar and Flipo in Chapter "The Hidden Energies of Work Digitization: A View from France Through the Use of Coworking Spaces", demonstrate how newly established coworking spaces turn imagined futures of digital enablement into reality, with worrying implications for energy consumption even as coworkers imagine these third spaces to be 'sustainable' and inter alia premised on ecological concerns. Ortar and Flipo's examination of practices identifies the silences that surround certain uses of energy either in or associated with these spaces that pervert the promise of decarbonisation commonly linked with shifts to coworking. They challenge the obfuscation that accompanies pro-digital thinking and advances idealised pro-environmental representations of digital technologies. The silences, they argue, suggest the need for a deeper structural transformation of how everyday life is organised to align with logics of digitisation and decarbonisation in such coworking spaces.

The authors in *Realising imaginaries* tie in with other analyses of digital technologies and their energy impact, such as work by Maguire and Winthereik (2021) on the proliferation of data centres. Maguire and Winthereik (2021, p. 530) interpret and conceptualise these emergent digital spaces as frontiers to be negotiated and regulated, arguing that 'as Big-Tech territorialises state land and resources, the state in turn reterritorialises the promising digital futures that come with Big-Tech'. They thus point to tussles over authority and how these are currently playing out over and through artefacts of digitisation. At the urban scale, Iveson and Maalsen (2019) caution that the algorithmic modulation of populations and the disciplining of individualised subjects can magnify forms of social control by authoritative actors in digitally networked cities. Thus, digitisation is inextricably linked with the workings of power on and through the newly introduced and set up infrastructures that penetrate not only energy systems but every aspect of societal activity.

Social control and questions of governing digitally networked cities also loom large in discussions about low-carbon digitised mobility. Electric scooter proponents in Norway, as Datava et al. illustrate in Chapter "Littering the City or Freedom of Mobility? The Case of Electric Scooters", mobilise framings of a low-carbon transport footprint and align this with a particular vision of sustainable urban mobility. The digitisation of end-users' everyday life becomes essential for booking, tracking and paying for shared devices, and risks becoming a taken-forgranted characteristic of the e-scooter business in urban Norway. This is so much so that digitisation is treated as secondary to prominently contested issues such as the shared usage of streets by multiple stakeholders entitled to public space. Again, digitisation and decarbonisation, when put into effect, display not only a 'natural' diffusion of (end-user) digitisation and allegedly eco-friendly mobility, but face contestation, with competing imaginaries of urban space and flows.

Similarly, end-user digitisation has turned into an infrastructural basis for the very means of decision-making through which people in Australia approach energy-efficient home renovation. In Chapter "Mediatised Practices: Renovating Homes with Media and ICTs in Australia", Aggeli and Mechlenborg analyse how online interactions and digital communication through information and communication technologies (ICTs) have turned into core resources for imagining, choosing, documenting and communicating about low-carbon home renovation. Social media penetrate home renovation to inflect and embed low-carbon renovation practices into households with remarkable success.

These scholarly insights underscore the contingent nature of evolving imaginaries of digitisation even as they have begun to consolidate. The impacts and consequences of installing digital systems are to a great extent determined by the intent and interests of those who transform imaginaries into reality. Through interactions and powerplay within a reconfiguring assemblage of actors and interests, these actors can arguably provide for what Pansera et al. (2019, p. 1) call 'unwise futures' that are marked by the pro-elite allocation of benefits and control through digital technologies, or for 'wise futures' where ordinary people are able to 'freely access digital technologies that are convivial, just, environmentally sustainable, and guided by democratic deliberation'.

#### **Conclusion**

In sum, the chapters in this book take on issues of decision-making and power within diverse situated manifestations of the twin transition. This cross-cutting theme has been central in digital media studies (Geismar and Knox 2021; Risam 2019) and in energy studies (Strauss et al. 2013; Boyer and Howe 2019). Digitisation and its most familiar manifestation—the internet—were accompanied by imaginaries of democratising information provision and access, yet the 'information superhighway' is today de facto shaped by a few dominant information technology companies and software developers, who apply ontologies, values and legal frameworks that originate in the Global North, with little scope to deviate from market-dominating applications and programmes (see Risam 2019; but also Anderson and Christen 2013 for an alternative). Authoritative institutions, especially in times of crisis, exercise control over digital infrastructure and connectivity. Likewise, power structures and inequalities related to energy systems routinely manifest as oligopolistic utilities and in neocolonial resource extractivism and trade systems. These perpetuate the fossil fuel-industrial nexus and produce new patterns such as the geopolitical rare-earth extractive race that enables the current rollout of energy storage (e.g. through lithium-ion batteries). Neocolonial and exploitative tendencies can become emergent, reproduced and entrenched when digitisation is combined with energy provision (Riedke in this book), traits that find resonance in geopolitics. Combining attention to digitisation and energy systems, as this book does, generates insights into such dynamics, with power imbalances and dependence on market-driven energy provision and internet companies exacerbating the marginalisation of population sub-groups and indeed entire nations.

Thus, this book demonstrates how the issues of energy efficiency and data generation we have unpacked above abound, unfold and are contested while also being inextricably intertwined with the development of future energy systems and wider societal infrastructure and practices. The grounded approaches on offer here suggest a variety of ways in which research can engage with digitisation and low-carbon transitions even as they unfold, and necessarily so in order to exercise our agency on societal development. By highlighting two conceptual arenas related to digitisation and energy transitions, this book articulates an agenda for future ethnographic engagement with and ethnographically informed conceptualisation of digitisation and low-carbon transitions as intertwined elements of profound global environmental change.

First, the study of digitisation and low-carbon transitions must be situated within the contexts where digitisation plays out. Given its ubiquitous nature (Sareen and Haarstad 2021), this includes a non-digitisationcentric approach (Pink et al. 2015) as well as explicit acknowledgement of the interpellated nature of digitisation as a phenomenon and scholarship on this phenomenon (Douglas-Jones et al. 2021). Thus, the challenge for scholars is both to understand digitisation within the larger dynamics of its intensification at scales that range from the local to the global, as well as to engage reflexively with it through methods that are themselves conditioned by the digitisation of data, practices of subjects, and the digitised nature of academic practice.

Second, digitisation and low-carbon transitions must be understood as necessarily in the making, contingent and contested, which imbues portrayals with an inherently speculative quality. This does not mean that theories can be dismissed as competing fictions, but rather that analyses of digitisation in the energy sector in general and during low-carbon transitions in particular require explicit attention to power dynamics and the political economic undergirding of socio-technical change. Identifying and foregrounding tacit interests, multiple potential pathways and normative conundrums are all essential elements of engaged ethnography, where grappling with digitisation entails analytical unpacking as well as shaping and realising imaginaries of digitisation in the very process of sense-making.

Thus, we offer a foray into situating digitisation and realising imaginaries, with the hope of advancing engaged ethnographic scholarship on digitisation and low-carbon transitions. Digitisation is inextricably linked with the urgent societal project of low-carbon transitions in a manner that can be generatively approached and conceptualised as an emergent twin transition to a digitised and low-carbon future, a form of hyper-connected climate mitigation. Given the widespread societal

**Exhibition Fig. 1** Martin Andersen works on 'Uro' at the Rjukan Solarpunk Academy (*Source* David Odell [used with permission])

implications of this shift, such change has resonance in diverse established scholarly fields, such as socio-technical transitions, media studies, geopolitics, resource governance and not least energy anthropology and energy geographies. The task of generating, cross-fertilising and consolidating conceptual frameworks is essential to ensure critically constructive interdisciplinary discussion and debate. The pressing real-world challenge of digitising energy systems constitutes an exciting opportunity for timely, generative research. Exhibition Fig. 1 follows this chapter.

### **References**

Abram, Simone, Brit Ross Winthereik, and Thomas Yarrow, eds. *Electrifying Anthropology: Exploring Electrical Practices and Infrastructures*. Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

### **Just Low-Carbon Mobility Transitions: A Research-Based Art Exhibition**

**Siddharth Sareen**

The biannual workshop of the Energy Anthropology Network kicked off on 22 August 2021 with the launch of a co-produced art exhibition by Rjukan Solarpunk Academy, as part of the Norwegian Just Mobility Transitions Network (JUSTMOBNET) funded by the University and College Network for Western Norway. Like this book which began with a call for abstracts circulated by the Energy Anthropology Network in late 2020, the art exhibition was many months in the making. Several JUSTMOBNET members visited Rjukan, the darkest valley in Norway surrounded by looming mountains, in early March 2021, when the sun had not yet shone onto the city that year. Except in the town hall square, where the sun mirror mounted by Martin Andersen on a mountain

e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
Centre for Climate and Energy Transformation & Department of Geography, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

S. Sareen (B)

Department of Media and Social Sciences, University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway

top reflected sunlight into Rjukan. Along with textile artist Margrethe Brekke, he established the Rjukan Solarpunk Academy in 2019, and this collaboration with JUSTMOBNET marked one of the institution's early projects, in line with the artists' tradition of engaging with research as a companion to artistic inspiration.

In late May 2021, Brekke and Karin Coenen visited Siddharth Sareen and the Norwegian Petroleum Museum in Stavanger, to study the proposed exhibition site and delve into the theme of the collaboration. Sareen shared insights from the Joint Programming Initiative Climate financed project 'Responsive Organising for Low Emission Societies' (ROLES), as part of which his team had been studying just urban low-carbon transitions in the rapidly digitalising transport sector in Norway. Coenen drew on her curatorial background as she and Brekke held discussions with Björn Lindberg and Anja Fremo as the museum's thematic and communication expert advisors. This was followed by Brekke interviewing other members of the ROLES team in Norway, including Devyn Remme, Håvard Haarstad and Katinka Wågsæther in Bergen, before she and Andersen set to work over the summer in Rjukan to create the exhibition.

What transpired were twin complementary exhibitions. Andersen took point of departure in an old fossil fuel car he had patched up, that finally broke down over the Haukeli mountain pass in Spring 2021. In Rjukan, he worked with hundreds of kilograms of car spare parts in tactile engagement with the salvage frontier of automobility. This manifested in a reimagining of car remnants in another setting altogether, namely on an oil rig that comprises part of the Norwegian Petroleum Museum building. A meta-comment on the tight historical link between petroleum as a commodity and the automobile as a technology, this became the exhibition 'Uro', a Norwegian play on words meaning both 'restless' and a 'mobile' object in suspended animation. With Norway being a global leader in the transition to electric cars (with the highest per capita rate), this clustered suspension of old car components invited the audience into a space for deep reflection, standing out on the oil rig gazing out at the Ryfylke fjord with the water glittering below the mesh floor, while the spare parts clanged in the breeze.

Meanwhile, Brekke was captivated by the idea of a National Association of Bus Users, which arose from Remme's work on the ROLES project and led to the actual founding of a civil society organisation by this name (in Norwegian: Bussbrukernes Landsforening). As Brekke engaged with the solarpunk notion of a manifesto for such an organisation to advance the interests of bus users as a vulnerable group of mobility sector stakeholders, she became acutely conscious of her own conditioning. She wondered why she—herself unlikely to buy a luxury electric car—had read the biography of Elon Musk who led the electric car manufacturer Tesla, but had not even heard of the world's largest electric bus manufacturers, such as Yutong, Build Your Dreams (BYD) and Van de Leegte (VDL). This sparked a foray into the history of electric buses, including their technical specifications, iconic examples such as Bogota's bus rapid transit system, and supply to Norwegian cities. Brekke assembled these details through evocative hand-drawn visuals and scribbles on to a tapestry of old lampshade material from a shutdown factory in Rjukan, a nod to the post-industrial legacy of the setting in which this exhibition took shape, in strong resonance with Andersen's poignant portrayal of the end of an era.

These five textiles enveloped walls in various parts of the Norwegian Petroleum Museum, juxtaposed with its sleek interiors and solid industrial infrastructures, blending into the background yet simultaneously standing out as the materialisation of something different. Along with these textiles, Brekke foregrounded a propaganda-style announcement of the National Association of Bus Users, to symbolise the possibility of meaningful engagement with the challenge of transitioning to a just low-carbon mobility future.

Each of this book's nine chapters is followed by an image drawn from this exhibition by the Rjukan Solarpunk Academy. The first four images feature the process and details of Martin Andersen creating Uro, and

**Exhibition Fig. 2** Detail of a car spare part that became a component of 'Uro' (*Source* David Odell [used with permission])

capture a sense of its assembled version on the oil rig in Stavanger. The next three images begin with the assembling of research-based details about bus users at Rjukan Solarpunk Academy, followed by technical details of electric bus types, and an emphasis on the meaning of 'omnibus' as 'for all', accompanied by scribbled principles for a solarpunk manifesto of the National Association for Bus Users. The final two images comprise overview shots of some of the textiles Margrethe Brekke placed within the Norwegian Petroleum Museum, draping its walls with varied colours to enable the condensation of ideas about things to come. Future imaginaries, salvage frontiers and energy systems in transformation are concerns shared by the Rjukan Solarpunk Academy and the chapters in this book, hence these aesthetic and analytical interventions feature complementary interplay. Exhibition Fig. 2 follows this chapter.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

## **Situating Digitisation**

### **A Solar Off-Grid Software: The Making of Infrastructures, Markets and Consumers 'Beyond Energy'**

**Eva Riedke**

'I sometimes have the feeling that they sell them the plasma television, the radio, the fridge, the mobile phone, before they sell them the solar unit that provides the electricity for these things' (Sandra Rundall, 10 January 2021). This was the critical, perhaps even cynical, view of an international investment advisor based in Nairobi, on the developments in the solar off-grid sector in Kenya. With *they* 'who sell' she is referring to solar off-grid companies and start-ups and with *them* 'who buy' she means the so-called 'unelectrified poor' who live with no or only partial connection to the electricity grid in Kenya.1

E. Riedke (B)

Department of History and Sociology, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany

e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
1 In order to protect the anonymity of my interlocutors, I have changed their individual names and also the name of the solar start-up that this article focuses on.

Kenya has one of the largest markets for solar off-grid products in Africa, due in part to a favourable regulatory environment, effective government policies, and the high prevalence of smartphones that has gradually made Kenya into a favourite launchpad for mobile moneybased services, including widespread availability of pay-as-you-go solutions, which offer an effective means for people to finance the purchase of solar products. Nairobi, frequently also referred to as the 'silicon savannah', has become a hotspot for digital innovation with a lively start-up scene. Here, under the auspices of the United Nation's (UN's) sustainable development goals (SDGs), national and international startups, investors, government agencies and NGOs engaged in the solar industry, are in the business to sell devices that are light, inexpensive, portable and minimal (Collier et al. 2018) for what has internationally been agreed upon as a minimum level of 'affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all' (SDG 7). While grid coverage in Kenya at first sight appears relatively high in comparison to other sub-Saharan countries, reaching roughly 54% of the country's population, the gap between electricity access among urban and rural households is wide and less than 20% of the rural population has access to the electricity grid. Furthermore, among those who are counted as having access to the electricity grid, many factually continue to live 'under the grid', unable to afford the high price for initial connection to the cables that run above them, or out of fear for volatile prices and unforeseeable blackouts. For this reason, the so-called solar home systems continue to be an iconic object of off-grid electrification efforts, all across Kenya (Dubey et al. 2020, p. 15).

Solar home systems come in different sizes, but typically they consist of a solar panel that charges an external battery and which, in turn, powers one or two lights and can charge one or more mobile phones each day. The box with the external battery also incorporates a control box through which the providers can track payments and in many cases also usage. These solar systems have become iconic 'bottom of the pyramid technologies' or so-called 'small development devices', that present themselves as *caring* commodities, able to meet people's basic energy needs (Collier et al. 2018; Cross 2017). They further embrace a minimalist design 'that emphasizes self-sufficiency of device and user' and are not embedded in wider attempts to engineer a complex system (Collier et al. 2018. p. 4). These solar products are marketed as renewable energy sources that serve to alleviate poverty at the same time as enabling countries' fast-paced energy transitions to less carbon-intensive futures. To borrow from Sørensen (chapter in this book), they are hereby marketed so as to make a notion as 'abstract' as climate change more 'concrete', and in turn users' participation towards its amelioration more 'do-able'.

As I will illustrate in more detail below, hereby also elaborating on Cross' (2013, 2017, 2019, 2020, 2021) 2 works, the solar home systems are made into 'goods' in a double sense of the term: designers design them to do well (financially) while doing good. They are 'goods' that primarily target populations understood to be 'infrastructurally marginalized', lacking connection to the electricity grid and living in energy poverty. But beyond these ethical commitments, they are also 'goods' inscribed with clear economic, for-profit motives (Collier et al. 2018; Cross 2019; Redfield 2012). The sceptical commentary by the investment advisor quoted above, wherein she suggests that solar offgrid products are sold merely so as to define new consumer subjects for new markets—reconfiguring 'their wants, needs and desires'—appears to suggest, as Cross (2020, p. 111) puts it, that the design and selling of these products could legitimately be understood as a form of 'predatory capitalism at a new humanitarian frontier'. Yet, as Cross (ibid.) further highlights, 'market *capture* can also be the extension of forms of *care*' (emphasis added). I follow him in this article in reflecting on the *practices* of solar entrepreneurs and their aims 'to do good', exploring how one in turn becomes witness not necessarily to 'contradictory logics' but rather to 'mutually enabling practices' (ibid, drawing on Ferguson 2015, p. 148).

In this article, I will engage with a small, German-Kenyan start-up that I have called 'Mkali Power' (mkali = bright in Swahili), that with the

2 Jamie Cross has written extensively about solar lamps as so-called 'small development devices' or 'humanitarian goods'. With the rapid development and growth of the solar market in recent years, I would argue that 'solar home systems'—which entail a lamp but also more—have worked to replace the lamp as a first-purchase commodity for many who live off the grid. Particularly for they have become more affordable.

onset of the pandemic engaged in a strategic shift.3 It moved away from the ongoing design, manufacture and distribution of its own solar offgrid products and towards software development, more specifically, the development of a sales management app. Initially, Mkali Power sought to use the software to manage its own sales in a post-COVID era, but then soon saw in it the potential to be marketed and sold as a stand-alone software tool to other stakeholders in the industry.4 The conversations on which much of this article draws, took place when Mkali Power was at a point of putting the final programming touches on a beta version of the app.5 They enabled my insights into the workings of the app, by allowing me to set up my own virtual sales network. I installed the beta version from the google play store, set up my own company, 'employed' a regional manager, 'hired' a local sales force and finally added individual customer profiles. I received dummy QR codes—akin to those attached to the real-life solar products—which I could scan and hereby sell to the customer base I had established. In this beta version, the products included a radio, a smartphone and a solar home system. The result was a somewhat digital fieldwork peculiarity, namely the ethnographic navigation of an app for which Cousineau et al. (2019) have proposed the term 'appnography'. Methodologically, by drawing on digital ethnography (Pink et al. 2015) more generally, appnography offers a means to analyse app development and discourses that develop around its usage, but also, as is my primary aim in this chapter, prompts one to scrutinize interface systems, features and affordances.

In what follows, I engage with the development of this software, show how the different elements of the software connect as well as the manner in which these have been developed 'to sit alongside of,

3 I have engaged with Mkali Power in the context of a DFG-funded research project concerned with ethnographically exploring 'Life off the grid: the study of solar infrastructure and ethical subjects' in rural Kenya. The project critically explores the nexus that is emerging between different efforts, pursued by a new generation of 'development designers', to connect the socalled 'off grid populations' to established grids (in an infrastructural, financial and economic sense).

4 This is entangled in more general efforts of humanitarian actors during the pandemic to explore the promises and pitfalls of 'big data' in humanitarian aid (Gazi & Gazis 2020).

5 Research for this article was conducted between October 2020 and April 2021. In addition, I draw on older, preliminary research conducted with a solar start-up in Berlin between January and August 2018.

on top of and interwoven with layers upon layers of the old' (Maurer 2015, p. 126). Hereby, the aim is to attend to the current challenge of needing to explore empirically—as also elaborated upon in the introduction of this volume—how renewable energy infrastructures fold in and upon other infrastructures. In this case, this encompasses the physical system for generating electricity off the grid, the wider mobile money payment services and a rapidly emerging financial infrastructure for consumer financing and debt (see also Cross & Neumark 2021). First, I ask: how does this new software in the making—a development that often appears to happen 'backstage'—come to constitute one of those 'initial moments/phases of structuration where new paths of extraction, circulation and consumption are charted […]' (Degani et al. 2020, p. 4)?

Second, my goal is to explore some of the ends pursued by solar entrepreneurs when they set off to market solar home systems to the so-called 'unelectrified poor' and how these often go 'beyond energy'. Solar entrepreneurs view their 'target populations' as belonging to the 'base of the pyramid', to whom solar power is provided in order to meet a basic need, a most basic level of human well-being, and simultaneously they see them as consumer subjects for new markets which hold the promise of profit and accumulation. Exploring the manner in which they are imaginatively conceived by developers, designers, engineers and solar entrepreneurs, draws attention to a central 'node' of the solar offgrid sector, where a *continuous tinkering* becomes necessary so as to make it hold together, work and expand (see also Korsby 2017).

Third, my aim is to explore through my engagement with the sales app, how the enrolment of solar customers into digital systems—which is often experienced and presented as a rather benign process—is also accompanied by a series of 'classification situations' (Fourcade & Healy 2013; Fourcade & Kluttz 2020, p. 1).6 Individuals before being sold

6 The enrolment in digital systems is, similarly to the development of digital solutions more generally, marked by an astounding techno-optimism that frames these as part and parcel of innovative environmental solutions, increased economic efficiency and a means to deliver on the promise of progress and modernity and as ultimately furthering energy independence (see also Quitzow & Rohde 2021). The former, however, often draws attention away from wider, more invisible 'processes' of planned and non-planned change and the manner in which the enrolment in digital systems also creates a particularly fertile space of experiments (on pay-go and the solar industry see also Kocieniewski & Finch 2022).

solar home systems are evaluated for their 'creditworthiness'—being sorted and slotted into actuarial categories, predicting the probability that they will be able to repay the loan. When paying off the solar product, transaction data generated through payments and usage data transmitted by the device in itself becomes a 'tradable object' (Fourcade & Healy 2017, p. 11). The latter is data that will allow solar entrepreneurs, so they hope, to establish markets beyond solar and to, in the future, disburse the 'right' quantity of credit, for the 'right' customers. Further, this data and the classification that is derived from them, will determine the ability of solar users to purchase other consumer products on loan (Fourcade & Healy 2013; Mader 2016).

### **The Promise of Solar**

'Solar energy is a promise', Szeman and Barney (2021, p. 1) write. It has become a means of 'doing one's share' against global warming, has come to enharbour public sentiments of progress, has come to provoke a sense of modernity, and it instantiates a sense of coming closer to a prosperous, healthy and just life (see also Amin 2014; Appel 2019; Boyer 2015; Harvey & Knox 2013; High & Smith 2019). Hereby, 'solar energy is also emerging as one of the sharpest and most powerful of ideologies, blurring concept, fantasy, and infrastructure together in a manner that makes it difficult to disentangle solar fiction from solar reality' (Szeman & Barney 2021, p. 1–2). Put differently, the story to be told about solar home systems, is also a story about an ever further evolving imagination (Cross 2017, p. 38).

What happens when solar home systems are marketed by local sales agents to those who live off the grid in rural Kenya? While the products are designed in Germany as 'green energy' solutions, with the promise to enable countries of the Global South to 'leapfrog'7 straight to cleaner energy sources, solar entrepreneurs frequently suggest, that this 'green'

7 The notion of 'leapfrogging' is concerned with enabling certain populations to bypass intermediate stages of technology through which other countries, particularly those belonging to the Global North, have historically passed (Amankwah-Amoah 2014; McKibben 2017).

dimension hardly comes to play a role for the end-users. As I am told by Bernd, the CEO of the Berlin-based start-up, 'the "greenness" is almost completely washed off by the time the products reach and are marketed to off-grid populations'. Lutz, one of the three developers behind Mkali's software, has a similar view. Reflecting on his ten years of experience in the industry, he rhetorically asks himself 'Is sustainability or the green energy aspect important to them (solar off-grid costumers)?' Answering his own question, he responds: 'I've been in the field for many years now […] and I think people simply have other problems. It's about *social status* on the one hand, when one can say, "I have a solar system". And on the other hand, it's about *easy access*'. As Lutz underlines further, when solar local sales agents sell the systems, they sell these primarily as a 'cleaner', 'safer' and (in the long run) 'cheaper' alternative to kerosene lamps.

Further, solar energy is marketed as a means of meeting a set of basic needs and as having become (particularly through the SDGs) an internationally recognized benchmark for the most basic level human well-being. As Cross (2017, p. 37) highlights: 'a life without light' is presented 'as a cause of suffering, equivalent to that endured by people without shelter, food, water, or basic primary health care'. A power point presentation for local sales agents in Nairobi in 2017 highlights yet again another promise. Solar, so it reads, offers those 'under-served' a 'connection'. By being able to power radios and televisions, 'a window into the wider world' is opened up (see also Zollmann et al. 2017, p. 9). In the process of marketing and selling off-grid products on the ground, the image evoked of those who live off the grid resembles the imaginaries that also stand behind other 'small development devices'—namely, these are devices produced to respond to basic human needs, they are 'minimal technologies for living' but are also ascribed the inherent (more general, utopian) ability to *transform* lives.

#### **Buying Through Pay-As-You-Go**

In the process of selling a solar home system to a customer, a local sales agent will next move from outlining how solar has the potential to change people's lives to explaining the payment scheme. Because customers can only in very rare cases afford the purchase of a solar home system through upfront payment in a single instalment, 'pay-asyou-go' has developed as the most promising means for solar companies and start-ups to enable widespread affordability of their products. The systems, which cost around 120–170 euros for the most common configurations are hereby sold to users against a small upfront payment, followed by regular, incremental 'top-ups' usually paid through low-cost mobile money services.8 Most contracts run for one to three years in a rent-to-own model. Start-ups require asset-backed debt vehicles to be able to roll out their products in this manner. However, they hereby face the challenge of raising debt and serving customers who lack a formal credit history (Bloomberg NEF 2016).

To address this, solar off-grid start-ups have developed their own credit assessment methodologies. Local sales agents, when meeting with a new, potential customer for the first time, are equipped with a digital questionnaire accessed through the aforementioned software app on their phone. They use this questionnaire not only to gather the basic demographic data about the household, what energy sources are being used so far and for what purposes, but also regarding the formal/informal employment status (if any), monthly income (if any), how much money is on average spent per week and whether the household owns livestock, land or any other physical assets. These are criteria used to establish customers' 'credit worthiness' and build on the more established and recognized practices of microfinance.9 It is another materialization of

8 Solar home systems of a medium size, supplying between 11–20 W peak (Wp) cost on average around 120 USD. Systems supplying up to 49Wp cost between 150–200 USD, Larger systems—from 50Wp upwards and which often include a television—can easily cost 400 USD.

9 Assessments by local sales agents vary from company to company: some businesses rely on agents' local knowledge, others rely primarily on the automated decisions produced by standardized questionnaires, and a few companies are exploring partnerships with alternative data companies to analyse call data records, mobile money top-ups, and mobile money transactions in an effort to predict repayment (Baer et al. 2013).

what Schwittay (2011) has termed the 'financial inclusion assemblage' an assemblage of a diverse set of subjects, technics and rationalities that come together in a movement across time, space and contexts and 'premised on the assumption that the 2.7 billion poor people in the world who do not currently have access to formal financial services are in need of such services' (ibid, p. 383; Waldron & Faz De Los Santos 2016).

The questionnaire picks up on the customer's income but also a range of other money objects (from cash to cattle, to land, to airtime) and forms part of a process by which solar start-ups leverage the assets of those with extremely limited purchasing power. This is the first bundle of data that finds its way into the app.

What characterizes the pay-as-you-go model that is subsequently offered, on the basis of this assessment of the creditworthiness, is that it is a form of 'nano financing'. A product or service is made affordable through small, daily sums of money, in cases where traditional financing and even microfinancing is too expensive or difficult to implement. Customers can make payments as small as 50 cents from their mobile phone when they have the cash to do so (Alderman 2019). As will become clearer below, company executives envision that the solar off-grid sector will, on this basis, be able to expand rapidly in the next few years, providing the infrastructure to market appliances such as televisions, fans, mobile phones, water tanks, refrigerators, but also to sell essential medications—including contraceptives, tuberculosis treatment or malaria—that in many cases don't make the household budget cut (ibid.). Solar home systems, so they envision, become the first consumer product in an imagined chain of many more. The initial data collected to establish creditworthiness is with time made to connect with 'born digital' data that is directly created through users' payments (and product use). Through ever new compositions of data, comes the capacity to sort and slot people anew, firstly resulting in a form of fragile 'capital' for solar customers, who now for the first time have a credit history that deems them creditworthy for future loans. Secondly, a 'commodity' of personal data develops for solar companies and start-ups, used to acquire more investments, to fine-tune services and, in the future, also to 'discriminate more easily between worthier and less worthy clients'10 (Fourcade & Healy 2013; Fourcade & Kluttz 2020; Mader 2016, p. 75).

### **Paying in Instalments**

Once creditworthiness is established and an account is created in the app for this new customer, what is the software used for? As suggested above, the solar home systems are all equipped with a control box and a SIM card that work to transmit payment and usage data.

The solar home system is 'unlocked' for the customer as soon as the initial instalment has been paid. Through an automated software mechanism, the seller however retains the ability to turn the device on or off from afar when credit runs out, or payments are missed. This is referred to as the so-called 'lockout mechanism'. Customers either prepay in fixed rates, or purchase daily energy credits for a small, fixed fee. Where these are missed, the device is turned off, reminding them to make another payment. Here, as Chad Larson, the finance director of M-KOPA (a leading solar off-grid provider in Kenya), put it in an interview published online, the mechanism serves the function of a 'loan agent'. 'Our loan officer is that SIM card in the device that can shut it off remotely'. 'We know that it's important for them to keep their lights on at night, so they can be counted on to keep paying' (Faris 2015). Those at Mkali Power, in contrast, worked to somewhat de-politicize the *agency* that lay in this mechanism, in particular its function as a payment reminder. As Lutz, one of Mkali Power's co-founders emphasized: 'we (at Mkali Power) talk of the "juke box" mechanism. It's similar to a juke box, in which you throw a coin, then it plays music for thirty minutes and then it switches off again'. With the analogy to the music playing juke box, the social and material politics of the mechanism are effectively moved a bit more out of view.

10 Solar entrepreneurs are all, in one way or another, in the data collection business, but often emphasize that they do not yet know what to do with it (see also Fourcade & Healy 2017, p. 16 on a similar observation).

Regarding the 'lockout mechanism', I asked Lutz how customers responded to this mechanism, when a sales agent would explain that the device can be turned off from afar in cases of non-payment. I added that on the one hand, solar was being marketed as providing a 'window to the wider world', 'a form of connection'. In turn, how was the ease with which users could similarly be remotely *disconnected* experienced by off-grid customers? Lutz responded: 'You know the only place where the fact that we can turn things off is considered a problem, is *here*' (in Germany, emphasis added). 'For those who buy these products it isn't'. He adds: 'A while ago I gave a presentation about this technology, and a few people came up to me after I had finished and confronted me with the question, "How can you do this?"' Lutz, thinking back to this disgruntlement that his presentation had sparked, goes on to emphasize what appears to him to be a related point. Namely, the problematization of why 'profit' and 'care' should not be able to go hand in hand. The product sold is sold to unelectrified, poor income consumers with a humanitarian ethos—aiming to improve living conditions and standards. At the same time, it is not a 'gift' or a charitable donation. The constitutive logics of the development aid paradigm that have factually receded at the same time persist, so he suggests, and are rendered visible again and again in moments such as this one. Lutz goes on to emphasize that in such situations, they (solar off-grid start-ups) are not recognized as 'a new kind of actor'. 'It is not like we have somehow gone back to classical development aid. We sell products and for these products one naturally has to pay, and people *want* to pay, because in a sense they (the products) thereby acquire a different worth'. The 'different worth' that Lutz highlights, can (among other dimensions) be linked to the data that the purchase of the solar products produces—feeding into (potentially valuable) future classifications of being 'creditworthy'.

Let me in brief also return to another point that Lutz made regarding the 'lockout mechanism', namely that users do not generally ascribe to it a discriminatory tenor. Reports published by consulting and advisory firms, similar to accounts by economic and energy specialists who design the products, suggest that this mechanism is designed to reconstitute users as 'disciplined autonomous agents' (see GOGLA 2020; Waldron & Faz De Los Santos 2016; Zollmann et al. 2017). Depending on the pay-as-you-go model adopted, most companies will allow for a certain period of non-payment and inactivity vis their software *before* the device is repossessed (typically around 90 days). This, in turn, provides a form of valuable flexibility, so designers suggest. Solar can then be made to fit into users' budgets and can be used to spend some days in the dark when money is needed for other things (Zollmann et al. 2017, p. 19). Electricity is made available for those who on a daily basis work to stretch a limited, uncertain income to cover more goods and services than is factually possible. In this sense, in a manner that legitimizes the lockout mechanism, designers stress 'provisionality' as a prevalent reality for these populations (Myers 2011; Simone 2004), while simultaneously working as a reification of autonomy and self-management.

Baptista (2016), who explores the multiple rationalities implicated in the use of the electricity infrastructure via prepayment in the *bairros* of Maputo, suggests that what is analytically significant for understanding such disgruntlements as Lutz has experienced, is that prepayment effectively *inverts* the order between *consumption* and *paymen*t for a utility. It thereby challenges a default strategy of the 'modern infrastructural ideal', within which there has been little room for technical differentiation of utility provision in colonial and postcolonial contexts. If we follow Baptista along these lines, then it is through an emphasis on the realities of everyday estimation and calculation that energy researchers, humanitarian practitioners and entrepreneurs work towards deconstructing this ideal—an ideal 'that has for long served to order, control and discipline populations, both discursively and materially' (Baptista 2016, p. 1008). They render the lived realities of the unelectrified poor visible and legible in a new light, legitimate the inversion of consumption and payment and thereby establish ideals of 'autonomy' or 'control' as they relate to spending and consumption.

#### **Creating a Record of Usage and Payment Data**

Back again to the software and the local sales agents. Once a local sales agent has successfully sold solar home systems to a significant number

of households, how does he/she continue to make use of the software? Clicking through the app, a local sales agent is given an overview of his/her customer base in the region, can see how the products are being used, visualize sales progress with graphics and charts, detect current late payments but also anticipate late payments and motivate customers to pay on time. Further, the sales agent can pull out sales and revenue metrics by date, region, product and payment type. For the executives of Mkali Power who sit in Nairobi or in Germany, the insights are similar, with merely a few more levels being added. These include visualizations of local, regional and countrywide sales performances, and the option to drill down to a detailed observation of an individual customer's behaviour, and his/her payment and usage data. The connection of solar home systems through Machine-to-Machine (M2M) modules, cloud computing and data analytics techniques is not only what enables them to be remotely locked/unlocked, but also draws attention to faulty products or theft. Further, it allows energy activities to be monitored in real time, for example regarding battery charging and power consumption—from afar and for each individual household.

Much of the value of the software rests on so-called application programming interfaces (APIs) established to connect to existing mobile money infrastructures, including in Kenya's case, Safaricom's M-Pesa, which is the most widely used mobile money platform.11 Every payment a customer makes via mobile money is managed and thus automatically registered in the app, including the amount and date of payment. With time, a payment history emerges, which, as software designers suggest,

11 Kenya has witnessed a somewhat unique development of mobile money loans. Soon after M-Pesa was introduced in 2007, a conflict emerged between Kenya's formal banks and Safaricom, the monopoly telecommunications firm that stands behind M-Pesa. From the beginning, this was, as Breckenridge (2019, p. 93) highlights, a conflict between different types of credit market: 'On the one hand, the banks […] were looking to build credit reporting systems and new government registration arrangements that would allow individuals and firms to formalize non-fixed assets, like vehicles and livestock'. The banks however were opposed by Safaricom and eventually also the Kenyan state, 'who championed a simple and effective system for delivering unsecured, high-interest microloans that did not require collateral registers' (ibid., p. 94)—establishing algorithmic credit scores for instance on airtime purchases and mobile money transactions. Over the years, it was a rift between the banks and Safaricom that has opened up an experimental space also for mobile money loans.

can be used at a later stage to calculate the overall purchasing power of each customer (a point I shall return to below).

All payments made by a customer for a solar product through M-Pesa or another mobile money platform are recorded and become accessible through the app. As Bernd, the CEO from a solar start-up in Berlin, explains: 'We gain certain insights from the transactional behaviour, and with the formal financial history that is established—which the unbanked so far have never had—they can then access loans and other credit products'. He added: 'There is much energy going towards these issues of developing algorithms and data analysis that can define customer's ability to also repay in the future'. On the one hand, the vision is to enable customers to climb the energy ladder and take out loans for larger systems and appliances. In addition, through economic techniques and narratives about 'boosting' peoples' purchasing power, the *payment space* that is created in itself works towards formatting new consumer markets (Elyachar 2010; Cross 2020, p. 119; Maurer 2012, p. 590). The digital payment data are a by-product of the relationship between the technology and the solar start-ups, but also further fuel for them (Mann 2018, p. 2).

### **Forging Consumers by Digitizing the 'Unelectrified'**

How does the image of the unelectrified poor alter when the aim of solar off-grid industry is expanded beyond the initial focus on electricity to wider interests in the development of infrastructure, the establishment of new markets and the production of 'proper market actors' (see also Meagher 2016)? Maurer (2012, p. 598) suggests that through the *provision* and *extension* of mobile money services, the client is progressively treated as a 'firm, a profit seeking and profit-making enterprise, who is weighing the costs and benefits of adding a new piece of machinery to its operation'. 'The poor' are formatted, so he suggests, as 'millions of tiny capitalist firms', underscoring their entrepreneurial capacity supposedly unleashed by their access to mobile money, credit histories and pay-asyou-go loans. Probing in conversations with those who work at Mkali Power as to what defines the solar off-grid customer in their eyes, Lutz paints the following picture:

Well, if I were to describe our end-user, it would be along the following lines: hard working, someone who works, and someone who is euphoric. 'Euphoric' because, in a sense, his environment is currently in the process of changing completely. There are things approaching that you never even imagined before [...]. So, you find it exciting, and you want more, you want to grow. (PAUSE) Well, I wasn't alive then and didn't experience the Second World War, but the way I imagine the post-war phase to have been, is similar. He feels that 'change is imminent, and I want to be part of it'. 'I want change, yes'. [...] 'I want to wake up', so to speak. (PAUSE) And yes, always hard working, earns money, and takes care of every business, just every business. [...] Hardworking and yes, lives in such a euphoric phase of life where everything is changing, and this person wants to participate.

This is a heuristic image of the sort that we can picture the team behind Mkali Power engaging with, discussing and disagreeing over, and is, akin to the narratives that Maurer (2012, p. 595) discusses, not 'descriptive of a "real" story being told by any particular individual'. The 'unelectrified poor', so this image suggests, similar to the ideals of 'bottom billion capitalism'12 more generally, are able to 'better their lives for themselves by relying on their own entrepreneurial skills' (Schwittay 2011, p. 75).

12 Theories about global poverty alleviation at the 'base' or 'bottom' of the pyramid (BoP) are so complex in their history that a more detailed discussion would go beyond the scope of this paper. Schwittay (2011) provides a comprehensive contextualization, exploring in particular how road maps for how to capitalize on the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid have been guided by C. K. Prahalad's seminal work (2009) on how corporations can eradicate poverty through profit. Popularized through his writings was the idea that 'As an aggregated mass, these billions represent a huge market potential for transnational corporations (TNCs), which by going after this "fortune at the bottom of the pyramid" will also eradicate world poverty' (ibid.: 71).

#### **Concluding Remarks: Off-Grid Solar and Its Digital Record**

My aim in this article has been to explore how in the process by which solar entrepreneurs work to define the place for themselves within this newest instantiation of philanthropy, development and capitalism, the notion of the unelectrified poor becomes a central 'node' that requires constant tweaking and tinkering. The 'humanitarian-corporate complex', as others (see Johnson 2011) refer to it, is a manifestation of the 'afterlives of development' (Rudnyckyj & Schwittay 2014), and is in itself always evolving, constantly bringing forth novel conceptualizations of the 'poverty problem'. The understandings of the unelectrified poor takes on different forms, as I have shown here, depending on what basic access to electricity is perceived to enable—at times most strongly tied to the marketization of a 'minimal' technology for living (Redfield 2012), at other times, foregrounding its centrality in 'public sentiments of progress, modernity and wellbeing' (Amin 2014, p. 138), then again as privileging people's evasion and autonomy from the grid and thereby also from the state (Jansen 2014), and finally also as a stepping stone to enable the transformational power of entrepreneurship (Schwittay 2011). Significant is that distinct images of the user, the customer and modern, desiring consumer are made to coexist in one and the same software.

With the marketing of solar off-grid products, also comes the 'enticement and enrolment into digital systems' (Fourcade & Kluttz 2020, p. 1). The tracking of payments, as well as the tracking of usage data, results in 'classification situations' (Fourcade & Healy 2013) that permit the creation of data that is a commodity in its own right—a commodity through which solar entrepreneurs seek to bring about 'subsequent exchanges in the market' (Elder-Vass 2016, p. 176). Inscribed in the notion of the solar good in a double sense—as a consumer *good* to be sold, and the *good* as an expression of care for distant others (Cross 2019)—is thereby also a form of obligatory 'reciprocity', central to different forms of digital capitalism more generally (Fourcade & Kluttz 2020; see also Datava's exploration (in this book) of how digitization is often treated as secondary to more prominently contested issues in renewable energy transitions).

The establishment of 'creditworthiness' and the vision to, in future, make available consumer credit for the 'unelectrified poor' that goes 'beyond energy' is—akin to the very marketing of solar off-grid products—draped in a veil of neutrality regarding the uses to which it is put. Access to both are framed as paradigmatic of 'chances at a (modern, consumerist) life that gets associated with the aspirational normativity' (Allison 2013, p. 223) that the 'unelectrified poor' have felt excluded from. Solar home systems become an instrument to, in the future, purchase new things on credit that one can also pay for over time.

Solar entrepreneurs who design and market solar home systems for socalled 'off-grid populations' underline that solar is just the beginning, and that other modern energy appliances, including televisions, fridges and mobile phones can soon follow. The 'lockout' mechanisms in all these devices, will allow them to be switched off from afar, as soon as top-ups can no longer be made. As Cross (2017, p. 42) suggests, for the off-grid industry, 'access to the market' and 'access to light' are working to be established as equivalent human needs. Conceptualizations of who those are that live beyond the grid and what constitutes the 'basic requirements for their dignified living', are precisely the 'nodes' along which solar executives, entrepreneurs and software designers work to establish this equivalency in any successful form. The points at which actors engage in definitions and re-definitions, as one of many forms of delicate tinkering, are points at which the layering of infrastructures becomes visible, and which also make clear where new relations are generated. These are points of structuration where 'new paths of extraction, circulation and consumption are charted' (Degani et al. 2020, p. 2). In the most literal sense of the term, 'working' with different images of the 'unelectrified poor', are practices infrastructur*ing* (explicitly understood as a verb rather than a noun)— through which also software designers work to mould, connect and expand the infrastructure of which the software is a part. Exhibition Fig. 3 follows this chapter.

**Exhibition Fig. 3** Detail view of 'Uro' installed at the Norwegian Petroleum Museum (*Source* Rune Egenes and Norwegian Petroleum Museum [used with permission])

**Acknowledgements** I am grateful for the various comments I received on previous versions of this text by those working at Mkali Power, also my fellow anthropologists at the University of Konstanz, the participants of the Energy Anthropology Network in Stavanger, as well as the feedback provided by Vera Linke and Clemens Greiner. Any inconsistencies remain my own.

### **References**

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

### **Contested Energy Futures in Hokkaido: Speculating with European Renewable Energy Models**

**Emile St-Pierre**

#### **Introduction**

During my first period of preparatory fieldwork in summer 2018, I reached out to a renewable energy promotion agency (abbreviated here as REOH) based in Sapporo, the largest city on the Japanese island of Hokkaido, to get a better understanding of the issues of their organisation and their clients and members, many of whom were municipalities and companies in Hokkaido. REOH had its offices in one of the tallest buildings in the city. I was greeted by Miyata, a junior member of the organisation in a conference room outside the main office space. I believed them to be in their early 30s. They laid out documents outlining some of their past projects and outputs of the organisation, speaking in a cordial but rehearsed way. Incidentally, we had both done graduate research in the same former coal-producing area of central Hokkaido.

E. St-Pierre (B)

Osaka University, Osaka, Japan e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
Our interview began with some very basic questions on REOH. The agency's main functions were as a go-between, networker and needsmatcher, standing at the intersection of national and prefectural policymakers, municipalities, energy producers and financiers among others, hosting seminars and distributing information to members. The agency hosted frequent events allowing guests, particularly from Germany and Denmark, to speak about the successes of renewable energy development projects. In its mission statement, dated May 2012 and signed by 50 municipalities, it makes direct reference to the need to fundamentally overhaul the country's energy policy and develop renewable energy resources, pledging to offer support in problem-solving and gathering information and know-how (REOH 2021). The discussion turned to some of the ways Hokkaido could achieve greater independence in its energy development, with Miyata mentioning microgrids, Home Energy Management Systems (HEMS) and Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) as avenues of interest. Having a general idea of what these were, but wanting to know a bit more about how Miyata saw these projects, I asked: 'Could you tell me, what is a virtual power plant?'.

Miyata, who had so far provided thorough answers, seemed embarrassed to have not prepared a reply to this question. I attempted to reassure them, saying I'm not looking for a definition, and that an answer of their own understanding would be most interesting to me. But already Miyata's reaction had told me something important: virtual power plants were not the order of the day, despite the emphasis by this promotion agency on drawing from European models. Their answer, while matching my understanding of it as a digital, decentralised supply– demand management system, also lacked examples of where this had been applied or policies to facilitate its implementation. Throughout my fieldwork, I would repeatedly encounter discussions of microgrids and increasing Hokkaido's energy independence, but there was generally very little discussion of the potential of VPPs or digital technologies outside of mentions of using Internet of Things (IoT) technologies in conceptual presentations by policy actors.

A few months later, in early September 2018, a devastating earthquake would hit south-central Hokkaido, causing damage to the largest coal power plant on the island, which in turn caused an imbalance of supply and demand and a subsequent day-long blackout as a result of the automatic shutdown of the grid. On that cloudless day, I got on my bicycle and I followed the old path of the train lines that used to carry coal from Yubari in the centre of the island down to the ports and thermal power plants in the south-central area of Hokkaido around Tomakomai. I saw convenience stores getting rid of their inventory and long lines of cars waiting at petrol stations, as well as massive solar power plants standing useless due to the protocols for restarting electricity flow first from base load carriers like hydropower then thermal, and only later solar. I visited the site of the coal-fired power plant that was the cause of the blackout, but it was not open to the media, let alone stray anthropologists. Most harrowing was the grim refrain carried by many I spoke to that day: 'good thing this did not happen in winter…' Compounding conditions of precarity have made the future uncertain and open to contestation (Allison 2014).

The vulnerabilities made obvious by the Fukushima disaster of 2011, which had somewhat slunk into the background in the years since then, were suddenly foregrounded in this other seismic infrastructural inversion (Bowker 1994). While the 2018 earthquake continues to resonate in Hokkaido's energy transition, practical advances in digitalisation, VPP, IoT and Artificial Intelligence (AI) remain largely excluded from these discussions, and from the daily practices of many renewable energy advocates and producers. This feeds into a broader and older discourse, in which Japan is seen as constantly lagging behind trajectories set by other wealthy, colonising powers. Within Japan, the former colonial frontier of Hokkaido is among the least developed prefectures (Mason 2012). National policies hitherto focused on promoting high-tech solutions that favour Japanese industries and on increasing the energy mix and strengthening the connections of the grid. They have more recently tried to incorporate the concerns of those who are more concerned with solar extractivism, heat use and local independence. However, as I will explore in this chapter, the divergence between these different energy futures and prioritisation of digital technologies remains materially unresolved in a way that provides a corollary to digitisation enabling sustainability as a matter of course, a point that also figures in other spheres of digitisation (see for example DeAngelo in this book).

Currently, we are living through a diverging expansion of digitalisation in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Several fascinating and concurrent trends are emerging from this accelerated change. Energyhungry cryptocurrencies have become all the rage (again), as has talk of their environmental impacts and the impacts of digitalisation more broadly (Lange et al. 2020). While demand for fuels for travel has in many places experienced a substantial downturn, the decoupling effect of emissions relative to economic activity from the shift to telework and dearth of travel has not materialised. Indeed, it has barely put a dent in global emissions, emphasising how little impact lifestyle changes have on the overall trend (Tollefson 2021). For all that internet and digital technologies can do to decentralise access and power (see also the introduction of this book), the underlying inequalities are so massive that they are unlikely to effect a reversal on their own, however small.

In light of these multiple effects of digitisation, the cultural evolutionist argument that Japan is simply lagging behind in digitising its society is not the focus here, although it is difficult to avoid mentioning this line of thinking as the government itself aims for a *Society 5.0*  (modelled after the European model of Industry 4.0) (Cabinet Office 2021) that increasingly blends the virtual and physical (Abram et al. 2019). The contrast in developments on energy and digital technology between Europe and Japan remains interesting to consider more laterally, allowing Hokkaido's particular renewable energy projects to speak back not only to European examples but also to the Japanese government's relationship to them and to European expertise.1 Whereas in many parts of Europe, smart technologies already play a significant role in a much more interconnected electricity grid, the material conditions of the Japanese electricity grid, especially in insular Hokkaido, have created diverging responses to the European models that promote local energy independence.

1 There is of course no one European model or experience of renewable energy development. These terms represent relationships between local actors in Hokkaido, the Japanese government and the teams of European experts and technologies they engage with directly and indirectly. I focus mostly here on a team of Danish experts on district heating and biomass, as well as reports and presentations from local actors in Hokkaido on their visits to Germany.

In this way, European models of renewable energy development and digitisation are adapted and resisted in a seismically shaken Hokkaido, making use of digital technologies to imagine more resilient modes of energy production and use while remaining sceptical of the promise of broad interconnection of Society 5.0. For better understanding of this adaptation and resistance, I introduce the situations surrounding digital technologies and energy generally in Japan, using points of comparison from Europe, showing how the digitisation of electricity grids consists in building yet another nesting abstraction built upon grid infrastructure and energy markets. Whereas digitisation has partially advanced in tandem with the growth of renewable energy, local energy independence movements, and cross-border interconnection in Europe, Hokkaido presents a corollary to the Japanese government's future designs for Society 5.0. On paper, its approach to digitisation overlaps with the imagination of biogas producers and activists in Hokkaido promoting local leadership in energy infrastructure, but has diverged from this alignment in practice, as the future built into the grid becomes unsettled and contested through multiple disasters. Whereas biogas producers may use sensors, collect heat data and benefit from German technologies, the goal of their heat-centric arrangement remains local independence, and their means of producing energy relies as much on multispecies relationships as digital interfaces. I argue that this represents a contrasting energy future to those put out by European models of local ownership within increased connectivity, and even from the Japanese government's adapted version of it, because Hokkaido's recent instability and historical underdevelopment have led biogas producers to seek local independence as a means of moving away from the electrification and digitalisation of a grid they no longer quite trust. I end with some considerations on models as tools for speculative engagement with energy futures that can bring us closer to the materiality of energy and limit the excesses of abstraction of present-day electricity systems.

#### **IoT Society, Energy Blockchain and Promises**

Some discussion of the state of digitisation and energy in Japan and Europe is necessary here, as is some elaboration on the relationship between digitisation and energy from social science literature. Though many technologies that would more granularly combine energy management with digital systems beyond markets remain in initial stages of implementation, there remains much to be said about the discussions and a lack thereof.

Another short field note will help illustrate the relationship between digitisation and energy. Ishidani, who worked for four years in a company that made and runs plastic waste-powered and solar-powered plants in Japan, told me that digital technologies and other advances were always paid lip service, but not given the incentives that renewable power production was:

A person at the local economic development office who supported me in my earlier career introduced me to people at the company. My job mainly consisted of managing finances and serving as a liaison between the main company and the solar subsidiary. On my own time I would attend seminars and expand my knowledge of the industry on my own. I also had opportunities to meet with policymakers to discuss how to make regulations more effective from our perspective.

I then asked Ishidani if his conversations with policymakers or within the company included digital technologies and VPPs, and what these discussions were like. Ishidani answered:

VPPs were not really discussed. On my own I learned about the megawatt markets abroad, and other examples of this kind of demand-supply balancing technologies. My sense was that these would take a long time to move markets. People researching these topics had clearly developed real technologies that would have effects if implemented, but there was still a significant gap. From management, and government, those [mentions of VPPs and two-way management technology] were often just performative calls (kakegoe) for them.

Government documents support this narrative. The fundamental technology that would enable VPPs and other data-energy management digitisation and potential decentralisation remains a long way from being implemented across the country. A presentation given to the Ministry of Energy, Transportation and Industry (METI) in 2020 notes how Japan has yet to mandate the implementation of smart meters and has yet to achieve a substantial percentage of use in households compared to many other developed countries (Mitsubishi Research Institute 2021).

Professor of Engineering at Tokyo University, Kashiwagi Takao (2021) notes how the Hokkaido earthquake has put into renewed focus, how an 'Internet of Energy' society can create increased resilience to disasters by cutting off demand from a malfunction in a large power plant at the point of connection, switching users to surplus energy supplies at home or from other areas. In an illustration of this society, many technologies that have yet to achieve widespread use are shown as interconnected, separate but with some overlapping roles. Yamamoto Shuichiro (2020), a member of the digital transformation (DX) study group of METI who participated in the preparation of the Ministry's 2018 report, notes increased attention being paid to DX in Japan since the publication of the report.

However, the Germany Japan Energy Transition Council (2019) has commented that Japan lags behind Germany in its implementation of VPP and Variable Renewable Energy technology. Japan has gradually implemented laws separating production, transmission and supply of energy since the 2011 triple disaster in a move to emulate laws in Germany (among other countries), but technologies like VPPs have yet to make real inroads as renewable energy subsidies discourage VPPs that also aim at trading energy on the market.

The way a VPP works in Germany is that it will use forecasts to schedule production from biogas plants and other decentralised production devices, and through bundling the production units participate in energy trading. Suppliers will buy the energy and ideally, the market will bring together demand and supply and optimise revenue. A Transmission System Operator (TSO) will settle remaining imbalances between groups using reserves (usually coal and gas) based on a universal balancing price for all TSO areas in Germany. In this sense, the reserve, the creation of new capacity and the management of existing capacity are all relatively separate in function. To optimise functioning and revenue, VPPs require not only climate data, but enough metering data on consumption to allow for optimisation and trading back and forth, meaning the widespread use of smart meters at lower scales than energy demand from industries.

The German government attempted widespread implementation of smart meters in 2019, but resistance loomed large and an effective roll out was not achieved. De Dutta and Prasad (2020) talk about the benefits of a society that organises energy and data along the blockchain, creating energy prosumers who sell their energy back to a blockchain-regulated grid. The 2050 climate goals are often cited in literature supporting increased connections and expanded energy markets between European countries through such technologies (Egerer et al. 2016; Fürsch et al. 2013), albeit they are still in their infancy.

Interest in these technologies and models is growing in Japan, too. Companies like Tokyo-based Enechange, which had its initial public offering earlier this year, are situating themselves as the vanguard of an information revolution, with innovations in AI, deregulation of energy markets and decarbonisation going hand in hand. Through their Smart Meter Analysis Platform, they offer a range of data-related services for clients, including energy optimisation, recommendations for gaining clients, facilitating provider switches and energy market information services including analysis reports of weather and news items (Enechange 2021).

Much of this sounds like the same kind of promises made at the time of the dot com bubble and genomics boom (Fortun 2008), but this time, figures in this line of speculation say, it is backed by the compounding technologies and cost reductions needed: there are smart meters, there are competent AI, devices can speak to each other almost seamlessly. Investors in Enechange, as well as companies like Tesla, speculate them to be ready.

Speculation is not just hope for the future, it has materiality (Horst and Miller 2012). Smart meters, data centres, low commodity costs, global supply chains, virtual management systems, IoT consumer devices, advanced market dynamics all come together to create a new digital materiality with new subjects (Gramazio & Kohler 2008; Pink et al. 2016). In this reality, abstraction and speculation from money markets and the digital would inflect the materiality of energy (Horst & Miller 2012, p. 5), similar to effects observed with the viral growth of cryptocurrency.

The history of the markets and digital technologies can be said to be intimately tied to that of energy's own exponential growth. This is a claim that can be found throughout the history of the energy humanities. Vaclav Smil (1994), drawing on Wilhelm Ostwald (1909) and Leslie White (1943), claims energy is the only universal currency, a means of abstracting and calculating all forms of activity. In this scheme, the evolution of civilisation follows organismic evolution in seeking greater and greater dependence on higher energy flows. There is ample reason to reject evolutionary classifications of bounded civilisations, but we can notice in these works an early recognition of society's connection with abstracted, de-materialised energy.

The materiality of this energy, the infrastructure, markets and labour required to produce it and move it have acted as barriers and accelerators. This is well-illustrated in Mitchell's (2009) discussion of fossil fuels being formative to democracy, wherein the move from a materiality of energy based on mines, coal, trains and heat to one based on oil, autonomous systems and electricity, reduced the participation of unionised labour in favour of concentrated power and capital. In Japan, coal-producing areas like Yubari in Hokkaido are examples of this shift as well, with the decline of coal mining from the 1950s to the 1980s coinciding with high economic growth. This ended with a market bubble and crash that caused a long period of economic decline and austerity (Kimura et al. 1996, p. 238; Mochida 2008). These historical and material antecedents have contributed to a wariness of investment in growing the island's internal infrastructure (digital and otherwise) amid rural depopulation and economic stagnation, leaving Hokkaido's grid weak to seismic disruptions as seen in 2018.

#### **Contesting Energy Futures in Hokkaido**

Hokkaido could now be said to be at a turning point in the digital materiality of its electricity grid. The earthquake showed how a very simple automated shutdown was effective, but also caused by a failure of the grid as such, a recall of Fukushima. Here, I try to situate discussions of transition between the Japanese government and local actors to argue that European models and technologies of renewable energy development are not translating only into a more integrated and digitised system, but also devolving into local, parallel infrastructures. Various actors in Hokkaido are adapting European knowledge while also pushing back on and using the government's own adaptations, and draw on these to speculate about a disaster-ready future.

In a presentation on its comprehensive vision of a decarbonising *Society 5.0* in May 2019, the Ministry of the Environment emphasises municipalities resilient to disasters, distributed and independent energy production and consumption, while also noting the contribution of IoT to innovation in energy and design. A scheme shows rivers, villages, the sea and forests in the centre, but the vast majority of the chart is covered with areas of economic activity and policy ideas that stretch out and overwhelm the place in this vision of Society 5.0. The name of this scheme, *Chiiki Junkan Kyosei-Ken,* is translated by the Ministry as the 'Circulating and Ecological Economy' but might perhaps be better translated as the *Regional Circulation Co-Existence Sphere*. In this deliberate move to combine physical and virtual space for a human-centric next generation of society, it is envisioned that we will leave behind the constraints of hard labour, hidden information and other social problems that still affect us in our 4.0 information society (Cabinet Office 2021).

Furthermore, in this scheme, AI, technological efficiencies and more renewable energy will make life easier. But there is little in this society's scheme that is there to ensure that efficiencies are passed on to workers and eliminate poverty, or to provide basic services that ensure people are cared for in an emergency. Indeed, if the experience of digitisation in Japan during the pandemic now provides any hints, it suggests that when these changes take place, popular concerns of justice will fall by the wayside in favour of political priorities in tech industry development. What is more, the well-being of ecologies might be limited to reducing emissions and human enjoyment of a non-specific nature.2 The material reality of energy, its history and its sources remain abstracted in the scheme, even though the specificity of each region's potential is cited.

From conversations with activists and renewable energy producers before and after this presentation, I learned that the aspect of the plan that was most well-received was the *chisan chishou* (local production, local use) ideal: understood as investing in region-specific forms of energy and resources to promote independence and resilience. This is where European, and in particular German models of *Stadtwerke*, public utility companies, were often used by the government as examples of local flows and use preventing capital outflows. Taking the town of Osnabrück in Germany as their main example in their presentation, the Ministry's representative emphasised how local use and local production had helped subsidise public services, as well as keeping expenses low and creating more jobs. Interestingly, the grassroots activism for (re)municipalisation and energy independence that define *Stadtwerke* were kept out of their presentation of the model (Hall et al. 2012).

At discussions and panels with energy experts from Europe and Japanese municipalities or businesses who had sent teams to Germany and Denmark, the idea of local independence through local ownership was more clearly emphasised in their statement of model cases. One presentation by a mid-sized city in central Hokkaido in August 2019 cited the city of Freiburg's urban planning and ownership of energy production, Jühnde as a municipality being completely self-sufficient in energy production, and that 46% of Germany's renewable energy is owned by individuals and farmers—all examples for taking control of one's own energy future that could be adopted even in relatively under-funded municipalities in rural Japan.

Similarly, at a panel on fourth generation shared heating systems in October 2019 in Sapporo, hosted by REOH, Japan's relative lack of district heating was compared to Denmark's systems to maximise heat efficiency through co-generation, heated water circulation and improved

2 There is only a vague mention of 'Lifestyles that are healthy and where one can feel connected to nature' and 'Rich nature as a stock, and the benefits providing a good life'.

insulation. Yet again, a kind of evolutionary framework is implied here, this time by a mix of Japanese experts, community members and activists, but also with the purpose of emphasising the particular challenges faced with heat in Hokkaido, and the way the country's feed-in-tariff did little to promote something as basic but extremely effective as improved insulation. The Ministry's follow-up policy, the feed-in-premium, has addressed some of these criticisms by making a new category of subsidies available for local biogas, biomass and heat use projects. In subsequent meetings organised by REOH in October 2020 and March 2021, centred on local use of biogas and the creation of greenhouses with IoT technology to control the temperature, the idea that a disaster could occur in Hokkaido in winter—making heat a matter of life and death—was repeated alongside hopes that this new generation of policy could be used to do more to meet local needs.

There is a qualitative difference in the way energy structures relationships in the aforementioned examples. With the *Stadtwerke* model, the Japanese government has taken to emphasise local responsibility for preventing outward expenditure on fossil fuels. Though the government has provided support for renewable energy projects in Hokkaido, the extent to which it is willing to invest in disaster-ready infrastructure and local ownership of energy along the lines of *Stadtwerke* remains in question in Hokkaido. As an example of disaster readiness, the Ministry of Environment's presentation mentioned solar panels used in a school and evacuation site in Atsuma in southern Hokkaido during the 2018 earthquake. Ironically, as I mentioned in the beginning of this paper, large solar power plants surrounding Atsuma connected to the grid were effectively made useless by grid protocols that required base load forms of energy to come online first. Many biogas producers I spoke to were of the opinion that if the government was serious about disaster prevention, it should be investing in it more seriously, as the earthquake had made clear people in Hokkaido could no longer count on the grid to always sustain them. In an emergency, they could be on their own.

Similarly, in an interview with city hall officials in a biogas producing area of central Hokkaido, I was told that the central government had denied funding for their effort to build an emergency-use microgrid they had proposed the year after the earthquake, citing cost-effectiveness (despite the Ministry of Environment posting a much upgraded budget for decarbonising and security projects). When I mentioned this on separate occasions to a farmer and a professor I know, their responses were similar: the government was more interested in increasing Hokkaido's connection and dependency on the mainland and their grid as disaster prevention rather than investing in Hokkaido's capacity for local use, contrary to the principle of 'local production, local use'. However, despite being denied the implementation of a Freiburg-like local energy ownership energy model, many rural inhabitants' desire for more local energy independence has not necessarily diminished.

It is understandable, then, that for many energy producers and other actors in Hokkaido, the government's promise of high-tech energy management solutions and digitisation fails to match many key concerns emerging in Hokkaido around independence and disaster preparedness, even as the local use of IoT technologies increases somewhat. The earthquake and subsequent power outage has taught energy producers and residents of Hokkaido that the introduction of higher-level systems and increased interconnection also implies an increased risk of cascading failure that leaves their older parents, their rural business, their friends with disabilities and many more especially vulnerable to further power outages, and to their at worst fatal consequences (Graham 2010; Howe et al. 2015). In other words, local actors have taken in the idea of digitised energy systems *and* the value of local independence (adopted from European experts they have come into contact with). Yet, underinvestment and disasters render this future vision for Hokkaido's ageing and fragile grid uncertain, instead of focusing on the idea of increasing connection and abstraction through larger grid projects and a mode of digitisation that ignores local self-determination.

#### **Models for Speculation**