Siddharth Sareen - Böcker

This insightful book examines the role of the electricity grid and cognate infrastructures in driving the low-carbon transition, addressing the key question: are low-carbon futures decentralised?Featuring chapters by renowned international experts, the book explores decentralisation as both a governance manoeuvre and infrastructural innovation, reflecting on the relationship between emergent data infrastructures and electricity systems. It sheds light on how the governance of collective electricity systems is changing in favour of rapid low-carbon electrification, providing insights into transition tensions and electrical outages across diverse contexts. Chapters discuss the concept of building structurally variable power systems and illustrate how distributed energy will affect existing power supplies, showcasing how institutional technologies are designed for decentralised energy governance. They also evaluate decentralisation versus centralisation in the electricity sector, demonstrating the transformative impact of distributed energy systems on polycentric grids.Are Low-Carbon Futures Decentralised? is an essential resource for students and academics in energy, geography, economics, governance and transitions. Its practical insights into sustainable development will greatly benefit geographers, political scientists and development researchers.

Available open access digitally under CC-BY licence.Portugal is among the best-placed European countries to take advantage of solar power, having achieved a five-fold increase in installed capacity during 2017-2023 despite financial constraints. In 2023, its National Energy and Climate Plan set an ambitious target for a further eight-fold increase from 2.5 GW to 20.4 GW by 2030.How can such fast-paced deployment secure sociospatial justice? What insights do political economic dynamics hold for future transitions? Drawing on long-term, multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, this book is a one-stop resource for policy makers, practitioners, scholars, and anyone interested in just solar energy transitions.Siddharth Sareen won the 2024 Nils Klim Prize, recognising his exemplary work in the search for renewable and sustainable sources of energy.

This open access book reframes sustainable energy transitions as being a matter of resolving accountability crises. It demonstrates how the empirical study of several practices of legitimation can analytically deconstruct energy transitions, and presents a typology of these practices to help determine whether energy transitions contribute to sustainability.The real-world challenge of climate change requires sustainable energy transitions. This presents a crisis of accountability legitimated through situated practices in a wide range of cases including: solar energy transitions in Portugal, urban energy transitions in Germany, forestland conflicts in Indonesia, urban carbon emission targets in Norway, transport electrification in the Nordic region, and biodiversity conservation and energy extraction in the USA. By synthesising these cases, chapters identify various dimensions wherein practices of legitimation construct specific accountability relations. This book deftly illustrates the value of an analytical approach focused on accountable governance to enable sustainable energy transitions. It will be of great use to both academics and practitioners working in the field of energy transitions.

The world is digitising as the need for low-carbon transitions gains urgency. Decarbonising energy requires the digital process control of energy production, transmission and end use. Diversified electrification across sectors requires real-time digital coordination of distributed energy production, At the same time, digitisation is accompanied by significant increases in energy demand, partly compensated through energy efficiency gains.The emergent linkages between digitisation and decarbonisation – that constitute and enable the twin transition – are the subject of this book. The collection features authors from across the social sciences who situate digitisation and low-carbon energy transitions in the socio-technical and political economic contexts in which they unfold, to offer insights on the dynamics and contingencies of digitisation in and beyond the energy sector.This is an open access book.