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Christopher Groves While energy consumption is necessary to support people’s everyday lives in a material and instrumental sense, the ways in which energy is used are also constitutive of ways of life and of identities. The Energy Biographies project at Cardiff University has used biographical narrative interviews and multimodal methods across four case sites in […]

Barbara Holler In the UK fuel poverty is defined by the Warm Homes and Energy Conservation Act as: “a person is to be regarded as living “in fuel poverty” if (s)he is a member of a household living on a lower income in a home, which cannot be kept warm at reasonable cost (UK Government […]

Laura Watts The Orkney Islands, off the north coast of Scotland, are leading the creation of a new global renewable energy industry. The European Marine Energy Centre, the world’s first grid-connected test site for wave and tide energy, has been up and running for ten years. The islands are also the site for the world’s […]

Annabel Pinker Drawing on fieldwork on the material politics of wind energy in Scotland, this paper considers how ‘expert’ figures that have burgeoned around the field of renewable energy make themselves both as professional and moral persons. How do those variously positioned as wind energy ‘experts’ at different scales – including engineers, energy consultants, community […]

Marianna Betti In Turkana, Northern Kenya, the novelty of hydrocarbon operations initiated by oil company Tullow in collaboration with the Kenyan government in 2012 is triggering both hopes and anxieties among local population. In an isolated and marginalized region, where basic infrastructures are lacking, where basic human needs are not taken care of and where […]

Amy Penfield This paper explores how the Sanema of Venezuelan Amazonia experience the petroleum economy through their everyday handling of large quantities of highly subsidised petrol (gasoline), which has become a remarkably ubiquitous substance in social and political life. The paper critiques the theory of the so-called ‘resource curse’ by exploring local-level experiences with petrol, […]

Daniel Knight Entering a sixth year of fiscal crisis, the Greek government, supported by the European Union, advocates renewable energy generation and export as a way to repay national debt, decrease deficit and secure the future of the Greek state. This paper explores the impact of multinational investment in photovoltaic (solar) parks on the Plain […]

Munkh-Erdene Gantulga The paper aims to study the debate of an ethical justification between locals and government officials about the project of hydroelectric station on Eg River in Bulgan Province, Mongolia. Government of Mongolia demanded to start the building of the hydroelectric station on the Eg River near the border of the Russian Federation and […]

Caura Wood The sea change shift to horizontal and multistage fracking that now characterize oil and gas resource plays in Alberta, Canada, was often made possible by considerable corporate debt. Where banks formerly served as a reliable source of funding alongside equity, the current turn in commodity prices has forced a retraction in bank lines […]

Carmen McLeod and Brigitte Nerlich The UK government has made significant investment into so-called ‘fourth-generation’ biofuel technologies. These biofuels are based on engineering the metabolic pathways of microorganisms in order to create chemicals compatible with existing infrastructure. Bacteria play an important role in what is promoted as potentially a new ‘biological’ industrial revolution, which could […]