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Short abstract:

Energy landscape is assembled with technology, sensitivity and localities. A PV greenhouse designed after a disaster meets local needs by connecting crops, soils, steel and young workers; a large-scale PV in abandoned salt pans involved a co-created conservation plan to ensure habitat management.

Long abstract:

Taking the material conditions and sensory dimensions seriously, an energy landscape is perceived as a specific mode of valuing and combining the senses with the environment and material things in a specific cultural context (Howes, 2005; Olwig, 2002; Ingold, 1993); landscape, artefacts and social life are mutually constitutive in the emergence of assemblages (Latour, 2005). The sensory interaction between technology and humans filling the environment causes the meaning of the energy landscape to differ, which means it is a contested concept subjecting to differing interpretations. Sensory groups and ethno-epistemic assemblages (EEAs) (Irwin & Michael, 2003) around the installations are crucial to the meaning-making of RE technology.

Two cases in Taiwan are documented below to illustrate this point. PV greenhouse designed in the aftermath of Typhoon Morakot exemplifies assembling RE technology locally, which can be understood as establishing connections among local environments, materiality and attachments while negotiating and experimenting with the most practical and acceptable formations of installations. Under these PV greenhouses, young people are conjured along with PVs, vegetables, steel frames, and gusty winds, forming the assemblage reflecting local concerns.

Under the policy target of zero-emission, large-scale PV installation was planned for Budai's abandoned salt pans, which serve as an interconnecting habitat for migratory birds. To ensure habitat management, a group formed by the central and local governments, NGOs, associations, renewable energy developers, and local participants created a conservation plan; 30% of the contracted area was reserved for ecological conservation and entrusted to a local NGO for close habitat management.