Contribution short abstract:

How is solar taken up by customers in Kenya as a relatively neutral technological means of harnessing an abundant, untapped energy resource in the absence of costly infrastructure while at other times ascribed an ontology that lays bare much larger socio-technical, post-colonial extractivist logics?

Contribution long abstract:

Kenya's solar market has been one of the world's leading markets for off-grid solar products - with rural households turning to solar devices as an opportunity to receive basic electricity in regions to which the national electricity grid hasn’t been extended, but also as a cheaper/more reliable/sustainable “alternative” to grid electricity. Engaging with ethnographic research conducted between 2020 and 2024 amongst solar customers in Kenya, the paper gives nuance to the disparity of local framings that in part paint solar energy as a relatively neutral, new, cleaner technology made available to those that have so far remained “unelectrified” versus solar as an abundant, renewable, natural “common resource”, that comes directly from the sun and should therefore be “free”. The paper seeks to hereby engage with local critiques by solar customers wherein solar is ascribed a technological ontology attentive to postcolonial dimensions of renewable energy transitions and wherein modern energy technologies are "in and of themselves" seen to be embedded in broader political economic patterns of green extractivism. What exactly is disentangled as customers claim that “solar is the power of God” and therefore “must be free” and how are these claims, in turn, weaved into local critiques of colonial or neocolonial power dynamics, imaginaries, discourses, and practices? With what framings and with what vocabulary do customers of solar products come to participate in global debates around consumption, extractivism and energy colonialism?