Paper short abstract:

The identification of socio-technical visions highlights the societal choices embedded in technological trajectories, reformist and influential visions and the need for a deeper societal and academic debate on energy and industrial transitions.

Paper long abstract:

Policymakers have recently started to address energy and industrial transitions. Several intertwined directions for these transitions have emerged such as demand-side interventions, electrification, hydrogen and sustainable fuels. Leading scholars are mapping systems, innovations and policy options (Chung et al., 2023), contexts and company strategies (Geels & Gregory, 2023), alignment challenges (Geels et al., 2023) and collective-oriented governance strategies (Schultz et al., 2023), while cautiously highlighting differences between technical, economic, political and socioenvironmental interpretations (Sovacool et al., 2023).

Yet these academics, as well as policymakers, downplay the struggles over the nature of future energy and industrial systems. In this context, ‘very few theories, even in the core, deal with a conceptualization of power, power relations, and power dynamics.’ (Sovacool, et al., 2023 p. 16), while energy technologies and transitions have an irreducibly political character intertwined with values, agency, responsibility, power and exclusion (e.g. Buck, 2021; Kloo et al., 2024; Tilsted et al., 2022).

We build on the emerging literature on the politics of energy and industrial transitions by applying a framework on socio-technical visions (Longhurst & Chilvers, 2019) to a large project on sustainable fuels. Using qualitative research, we identify five socio-technical visions. Three contributions are made to the literature on energy and industrial transitions: a) we elucidate the choices and values embedded in technological trajectories, b) three visions are reformist and highly influential, c) these choices should form the basis for a deeper societal and academic debate on energy and industrial transitions.