Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how a coal-powered Danish district heating utility is responding to a national call to reduce GHG emissions by 70% by 2035 and 100% by 2050.

Paper long abstract:

As climate awareness is moving to centre stage in the political discourse of this small affluent nation, energy sector entities are scrambling to reimagine themselves as being part of a fossil-free, zero-emission smart energy future. Business as usual is off the table, thus forcing energy planners and engineers to abandon long-cherished technology staples and renegotiate the imagined futures that go along with them. This paper is a preliminary report from an ongoing ethnographic project following a large heat utility company in the early stages of transitioning to 100% renewables in a more decentralized, sector integration-ready heat grid. The paper examines how this state of sociotechnical flux affects the way academic energy engineers interact with new technologies, engineering competencies, energy policies, thought worlds, experiences, power relationships, and tensions both within as well as outside their organization.