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Paper short abstract

This paper sits with the Faroe Islands at the crossroads, exploring how renewable energy is being mobilised as a relational practice through which island autonomy, interdependence, and geopolitical relevance are renegotiated in the making of Arctic energy futures.

Paper long abstract

The Faroe Islands, a self-governing archipelago in the North Atlantic, offer a distinctive vantage point from which to rethink energy, autonomy, scale, and geopolitics in a rapidly decarbonising world. Often cast as remote and peripheral, Faroese energy experts and policymakers are increasingly re-imagining this marginality as an advantage, reframing the islands as “the middle of everywhere”: a prospective hub in global circulations of renewable energy, shipping, and Arctic governance. This pursuit of energy autonomy through renewables seeks to deepen ties with Nordic grids, European carbon markets, and Arctic policy arenas and reveals that decarbonisation is not only about independence from fossil fuels but also about reconfigurations of energy relations across the North Atlantic.

This paper draws on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork to trace the emergence of a future where renewable energy is deployed not merely as infrastructure but as a relational practice through which autonomy, security, and geopolitical relevance are negotiated. Drawing on Faroese energy histories, this paper shows how ideals of the island-laboratory (Greenhough 2006) have framed the grid as a site for technological testing and world-making. Today, this ethos extends to geopolitics as the islands’ renewable ambitions intersect with strategic concerns over North Atlantic security. By foregrounding islands as vantage points from which to interrogate the evolving dependencies, sovereignties, and futures that structure global renewable transitions, this paper offers an empirically grounded account of how renewable imaginaries reshape the relational politics of island energy transitions.