Energy, Technology, Infrastructure: Governing Solar’s Sociotechnical Scales

• In Event: Practicing Epistemologies: Knowledge Work in Everyday Environmental Management and Governance

Abstract

In 2014, India’s then newly-appointed Prime Minister Narendra Modi publicly committed to increasing the country’s annual production of solar energy nearly a hundred fold by 2022. Although nowhere close to this target, by early 2018 India overtook the US to become the second largest solar market in the world, making it an important site to think through the logics behind the rapid and large scale roll out of renewable energy transitions. Based on long-term fieldwork amongst various solar-stakeholders across India, this paper explores some of the paradoxes of governance that arise as policymakers try to regulate the large scale import and deployment of a non-traditional energy form. Through a close reading of regulatory skirmishes between industry players and policymakers that unfolded between 2017-18, the paper illustrates how much of what we take for granted as the conceptual coherence of solar as an energy form (what counts as solar energy, for whom, and under what circumstances?) is negotiated in practice. Solar’s simultaneous position as technology, infrastructure and energy form across multiple scales makes its governance an important site to think through how energy epistemologies (Szeman 2013) unfold at not just at sites of innovation, but sites of implementation as well.

Referenced:
Szeman, I., 2013. How to know about oil: Energy epistemologies and political futures. Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d'études canadiennes, 47(3), pp.145-168.

Author

• Nandita Badami, UC Irvine