Olivier Labussiere

Wind Power Landscapes in France: Landscape and Energy Decentralisation

In 2000, at the dawn of the adoption of the EU Directive on renewable energy, a green-red alliance opened a political window for the emergence of a genuine wind power policy in France. Yet today, after more than 10 years of one of the highest feed-in tariffs in the world, the installed capacity in France is still low. Wind power, if it is to be developed at any significant level, has to fight against the centralization of both French energy policy and landscape protection. In this context, the landscape processes, which take place when wind power is either planned or sited at the local level through open governance, are places and occasions for institutional and social innovation that contribute to building decentralization. This chapter examines the ways in which wind power development has raised tensions over the centralization of both energy and landscape policy in France.The development of hydroelectricity in the French central Pyrenees at the beginning of the twentieth century was met with strong resistance in the name of landscape preservation and the protection of the tourist resource that landscape represented. Space had to be shared, and some reserves of picturesque features were obtained from the industrialists, in exchange for a free hand in tourist development. This chapter analyses how the interaction between the different stakeholders brought about this spatial partition and shows the ambivalence of the discourse constructed to legitimise it. By examining the case of the protected site of Gavarnie in depth, it sheds light on the social issues that were emerging as a background to the resistance to hydroelectricity and its impact on the landscape and shows how, through this resistance, the power of an external elite acting as a self-proclaimed aesthetic authority was imposed on communities in the mountain areas.This chapter discusses the way in which cross national comparison shall be approached. We assume that energy landscapes emerge at the crossroads of energy technology development and changes in current landscapes. We successively discuss different frameworks for approaching technology devel-opment and landscape change, before turning to the recent literature about landscape and renewable energy development. We conclude that cross national comparison of landscapes of energies should be attentive to the type of landscape tradition at work in each country and account for the fact that the development of renewable energy endows these traditions with a renewed existence. Depending on the extent and the focus of the conflicts or controversies raised around RE projects, the method and focus of the analysis shall differ.

Energy Transitions and Potentials for Democratic Change

This chapter sets forth the critical (in)sight made possible by the book’s inquiry into current conduct of energy transition. Placing the sights derived from our inquiry side by side, it shows that ‘renewable energy resource’, ‘market’, ‘economic instrument’, ‘technological demonstration’, ‘scale’, and ‘horizon’ should all be regarded as constructed categories, which incorporate and foster definite and situated politics. While revisiting what transitioning means, the chapter makes clear that a relational analysis has a systemic reach because it allows acknowledgment of the consequences of this politics and engagement with the implications of current energy transition processes. It concludes with proposing the idea of ‘transition potential’ and suggesting ways of sustaining energy transition potentials that are more democratic.

The Temporalities of Energy Transition Processes

This chapter provides a critical inquiry into the processes of time-making and agreeing upon collective horizons for the energy transition. A broad range of academic literature looks at the energy transition as an interval, a ‘matter of timing’ (historical drivers, pace of the transition), in which distant futures and anticipatory attitudes steer the way in which to bridge a gap. Different from this, this chapter develops a pragmatic framework which approaches the energy transition as a process of change in which new assemblages and new durations are performed. Analysing different case studies in France and Germany, it shows that ‘nearness’ (recent past and near future) has a major influence on the steering of energy transition processes because it is a disputed zone for selecting, renaming entities from different times, and agreeing upon new enduring assemblages.

How to Inquire About Energy Transition Processes

This chapter introduces the aims and method of the book. It starts with the assumption that the current conduct of the energy transition raises issues of democracy and sets the book the task to address these by inquiring into actual energy transition processes. The chapter draws on the philosophy of pragmatism in outlining its inquiry, defined as an investigation based on a large set of case studies attending to the consequences of energy change processes so as to make these consequences explicit to actors. The chapter then explains how the book addresses the current conduct of the energy transition by inquiring into its key dimensions, namely making new energy resources, passing through markets, economic instruments, technological demonstration and the spatialities and temporalities of energy transition processes.

New energy resources in the making

The social sciences have foregrounded the importance of the materiality of fossil energies in the political construction of democracies. Recently, they have begun to challenge the idea that renewable energies were naturally associated with more democratic political ideals. Building on these developments and on the premise that (renewable) energy resources are not simply given as such by nature, the chapter proposes a framework to explore the material assemblage of energy resources in four different cases–wind, solar, biomass energy and distributed load shedding. Importantly, the chapter points out the diverse ways in which these resources are assembled and highlights the related political effects. It shows that the democratic dimension of renewable energies should not be regarded as one of their inherent attributes, but as a possibility that depends on their socio-material assemblage.

Technological Demonstration at the core of the Energy Transition

Demonstration projects gather research and industry actors around projects and organisational settings ‘demonstrators’/‘demonstration projects’ and ‘demonstration programmes’–aimed at accelerating innovation. They are increasingly used in the conduct of contemporary energy transitions, especially in the European Union. This chapter addresses the democratic dimension of demonstration projects. Based on three cases of technological demonstration in the EU–CCS, smart grids, low carbon communities—it analyses the ways in which these demonstrations jointly construct their public, their object and the political principles that hold the two together. The analysis shows that there are significant democratic issues associated with these demonstrations. It suggests that we should analyse demonstration projects in relationship to their broader institutional environment and the social forces that challenge their ends.