Elaine Forde is a lecturer at Swansea University. Her research explores the ethnography of energy, with a particular focus on how new political and technological regimes are changing the relationship between energy and societies.

“Two hundred years ago, Welsh coal was already fuelling the planet’s first industrial revolution. One hundred years have now passed since Lenin announced that “electrification of the entire country” was the precondition for the planned economic development of communism, in which factories and power stations would be the new ‘centres of enlightenment.’ With her sophisticated investigation of the socio-technical and close-up ethnographic observations, Elaine Forde now demonstrates that, as creative individuals devise original ways of life in their eco-villages, off multiple grids, both inside and outside the plan, Welsh communities are again prominent in the global vanguard.”

• List of Illustrations ForewordPreface Acknowledgements 0 Introduction 1 Wales 2 Y Mynydd: A Village off the Grid 3 Tir y Gafel: A Model Village 4 More Problems with Community 5 Living Off-grid: Towards a Material Culture6 OPD: Policy in Practice 7 Concluding Remarks References Index