Contribution short abstract:

What are the multiple cycles and circularities of renewable electricity? If it is spoken of as endlessly renewable, how to account for the limited lifespan of its infrastructures? If its infrastructures endure as waste, ruin or assets, are they aligned with linear or cyclical temporalities?

Contribution long abstract:

The world of electrical circuits is full of fascination and complexity. Being so difficult to perceive directly, electricity courts a panoply of metaphor, narrative and idiom. People imagine electrons moving through cables like liquid pouring through a pipe, or generators moving electrons from place to place, circulating endlessly yet directionally to provide power or heat where it is desired, or cycling through sinewaves, humming and crackling along cables or through transformers. Electricity exists only in the present – it has no endurance. Switch off the generator and it is gone. Electrical grids supply energy in the here and now, their greatest technical challenge being one of ‘storage’ or extending the instant in which electricity is available.

Electrical infrastructures, on the other hand, move from shiny and new to shabby and broken in just a few decades. The temporal horizon of electrical infrastructure design is often as short as twenty to thirty years, even for renewable energy installations. In a moment when renewable energy infrastructure is being promoted and installed as a matter of urgency, the potential for circular economies of infrastructure is only just coming into focus, and the links between biodiversity protection and infrastructure development are still seen as innovative. This intervention explores the Cycles, Circles, Circulations of electrical infrastructure by unwriting the hegemonic frameworks of renewable energy.