Paper Short Abstract:

Can ethnography parse traces of infrastructural futures to come? This paper draws on an ethnography of community energy in the UK to prefigure one possible future of energy and to reflect on the implications of its articulation.

Paper Abstract:

In this paper we speculate, along with community energy practitioners in the UK, on what the future of energy could look like in 2030. Building on a prospectus for an energy company of the future that one of the authors helped put together in 2018, we explore how we might discern signals of the future from our present research on people, energy and infrastructure. Paying attention not only to technical systems but to the relational promises that carry emergent technical forms forward, we propose an energy future where a newly electrified and decentralised person emerges as the proto energy citizen of an increasingly renewable-driven system. As people are refigured as conduits for newly electrified relations, we find them drawn into socio-material arrangements in which they have to grapple with questions of distribution, equity, and material instability. Domestic routines are forced to confront both earthly dynamics of weather and climate, and an electric body politic made up not only of people but of a distributed array of energetic objects – cars, houses, batteries. Will this come true? With what effects? And what might be the implications of writing this future down for ushering it into being or warding it off?