Paper short abstract:

Hybrid infrastructures for alternative water and electricity supply are increasingly common. Interrogation of the interplay of motivations and justifications is important to understand energy transitions and their impacts, with opportunities for rethinking hybrid and heterogenous infrastructures.

Paper long abstract:

Largely in response to the growing costs and insecurity of water and electricity supply from municipal and public systems, increasing numbers of households and businesses are installing hybrid infrastructures for alternative supply sources. The direct impacts of rolling electricity blackouts and the threat of municipal water running out in Cape Town have shaped changes in behaviour for accessing and consuming electricity and water, revealing of the importance of context in driving change. It is important to analyse these shifts through a weighing of motivations and justifications, the paper showing how environmentalist justifications often predominate the discourse despite original motivations for change coming from a mix of other factors. The paper is methodologically based on interviews with businesses, households, officials and experts. With these, an autoethnographic vignette explore the blur between motivations and justifications for alternative energy and water supply, demonstrating the tensions between stated and actual attentions. This article aims not to argue simply that environmental justification for changing behaviour regarding water and electricity amount to nothing more than greenwashing, but instead that careful interrogation of motivations in interplay with justifications is important to understand the nature of energy transitions and their complex drivers and impacts. Using this lens to explore the principles and pragmatism of households, businesses and state actors is revealing of the potential for justice in the energy transition as well as of the impact of context on these shifts, arguing for the importance of legislation, policy and public education to guide regulation of transforming infrastructures.