Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the political temporality of energy forecasts. Through the case of Ghana, it looks at how politically-contracted dependencies on oil prevented the realisation of a renewable energy future, challenging conventional views of 'energy transitions' as a linear and generic process.

Paper long abstract:

In popular discourses of energy transitions, the replacement of fossil fuel dependencies by renewable energy sources seems both inevitable and imperative. In practice, however, hydrocarbons and renewables weave complex patterns of complementarity and contradiction that cannot be neatly folded into mutually-exclusive alternatives. In this paper, I describe how a promising future for renewable energy projects in Ghana was prevented from coming into being even as the country ranked amongst the top growing renewable energy markets globally. In the past 5 years, Ghana has undergone a curious energy 'transition': not from fossil fuel dependency to renewables, but from energy shortages to energy excess amounting to almost twice its peak demand, wasting an average US$ 24 million a month for unused power generated by IPPs contracted during an election year. As a result, renewable energy projects have come to a stall, as the government has banned any addition to its grid. As redundant thermal plants lie idle in Ghana's overcharged electricity network, renewables constitute fallow presents and prevented futures, 'stranded assets' of unrealised potential that point to the political temporalities of energy transitions and forecasts. Based on ongoing ethnographic research conducted in Ghana since 2014 with energy providers, policymakers, politicians, oil companies and electricity workers, I reflect on the political challenges of energy futures in an unequal world. Rather than accepting the linear narrative of an 'energy transition' away from fossil fuels, I argue that an ethnographic attention is needed to explain the contradictory and conflicted landscapes of energy production today.