Resisting and Reconciling Big Wind: Middle Landscape Politics in the New American West

Abstract: While critical geographers have addressed how place politics impacts rural landscapes, less attention has been paid to the particular ways in which rural landscape identities are being impacted by the new energy economy. The nascent US wind energy opposition movement is evidence of broad, organized resistance to the landscape impacts associated with the re‐sculpting of rural energy geographies. Drawing from cultural landscape and place theory, this article examines the shifting terrain of wind opposition in the “New American West”. The article argues that wind energy opposition is fundamentally about who speaks for and negotiates conflicting social commitments to technology, economic values and an imagined American pastoral identity. By examining a case study of wind development in Nevada, this article considers how renewable energy development can constructively acknowledge the important role the “middle landscape” continues to play in American constructions of rural space.     

Renewable Energy Politics: Policy Typologies,Policy Tools,and State Deployment of Renewables

This paper investigates the competing forces driving the development of renewable energy in the American states. We formulate a framework of state renewable energy politics and develop a set of hypotheses regarding the role of politics, policies, and prices in renewable energy development. We test these hypotheses with a fixed effect vector decomposition model using a panel data set for the U.S. states from 1990 to 2008. The results indicate that renewable energy development is influenced by regulatory institutions, the party affiliations of the governor and legislators, and the professionalism of the legislature, accompanied by the effects of various policy instruments.     

Making Space for Wind Farms: Practices of Territorial Stigmatisation in Rural Denmark

While issues of siting wind farms have often revolved around their local resistance, finding adequate locations and gaining access to land for large wind energy projects has become an increasingly significant challenge for developers, in particular in small countries with relatively mature wind energy sectors, such as Denmark. By drawing on the case of “Outskirts‐Denmark”, this paper focuses on how existing territorial stigma of rural areas is co‐produced and mobilised by wind farm developers to make space for large wind farm projects. In doing so, we demonstrate that the mobilisation of stigma through derogatory rhetoric and forecasting rural decline is used to legitimise the purchase and demolition of properties in marginalised rural areas. We then critically discuss how these developer practices produce controversies over the erosion of rural communities and are entangled in a neoliberal undermining of the planning system, revealing issues of rural energy justice.     

RHX Dating: measurement of the Activation Energy of Rehydroxylation for Fired‐Clay Ceramics

In rehydroxylation (RHX) dating, the activation energy of the rehydroxylation reaction is required first in the estimate of a material's effective lifetime temperature (ELT), and second to correct the RHX rate constant obtained at a given measurement temperature to that at the ELT. Measurement of the activation energy is thus integral to the RHX methodology. In this paper, we report a temperature‐step method for the measurement of activation energy and develop fully the underlying theoretical basis. In contrast to obtaining the activation energy from a series of separate experiments (each of which requires the sample to be dehydroxylated prior to measuring the RHX rate constant), the temperature‐step method not only requires a single dehydroxylation at 500°C but also eliminates repeated acquisition of Stage I data, which are not required for dating purposes. Since the first temperature step is set to correspond to the temperature at which a dating determination is carried out, the measurement of rate constants at higher temperatures simply becomes an extension of dating. Consequently, the logistics of obtaining the activation energy of rehydroxylation are greatly simplified.     

Towards an Energy Politics In‐Against‐and‐Beyond the State: Berlin's Struggle for Energy Democracy

Social movements in struggle around energy are currently developing an imaginary of “energy democracy” to signify the emancipatory energy transitions they desire. Deploying a scholar‐activist perspective, this paper contributes to debates around the concretisation of the energy democracy imaginary by exploring the relationship of energy democracy movements to the state. To do so, I focus on the experiences of the Berliner Energietisch campaign, which in 2013 forced (and lost) a referendum aiming to extend—and democratise—the local state's role in Berlin's energy governance. Drawing on relational theories of the state, I argue that it is productive to read Berliner Energietisch as enacting an energy politics in‐against‐and‐beyond the state. In making this argument, I draw out implications for theoretical and strategic debates around the commons and the state.     

Making Space for Energy: Wasteland Development,Enclosures, and Energy Dispossessions

This paper analyzes why and how wasteland development narratives persist through an evaluation of wasteland development policies in India from 1970 to present. Integrating critical scholarship on environmental narratives and enclosures, I find that narratives of wastelands as “empty” spaces available for “improvement” continue because they are metaphors for entrenched struggles between the government's shifting visions of “improvement” and communities whose land use practices contradict these logics. Since the 1970s, “improvement” has meant establishing different types of tree plantations on wastelands to ostensibly provide energy security. These projects have dispossessed land users by enclosing common property lands and by providing forms of energy incommensurate with local needs, a trend I term “energy dispossessions”. Factors enabling energy dispossessions include the government's increased attempts to establish public–private partnerships to carry out “improvement” and a “field of observation” constructed to obscure local livelihoods. Unveiling these logics will help to problematize and contest future iterations of wasteland development.     

Energy Colonialism and the Role of the Global in Local Responses to New Energy Infrastructures in the UK: A Critical and Exploratory Empirical Analysis

Governments, namely in the global North, are fostering the deployment of large‐scale low carbon and associated energy infrastructures (EIs), such as power lines, to mitigate climate change. However, when infrastructures are to be deployed, opposition is often found. Environmental justice—involving issues of distributive and procedural justice and recognition—and associated inter‐group relations, has been identified as a key aspect for local opposition. However, research has rarely examined local perceptions of environmental justice and associated practices, such as energy colonialism, within a global perspective. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, we examine if and how different‐level intergroup relations and collective narratives shape people's social‐psychological and geographical imaginaries and responses to EIs. Focus groups were conducted with community members affected by proposals to construct high‐voltage power lines in the UK. Analyses suggest that narratives around England's colonial history—within Britain and beyond Britain—shape responses to EIs.     

Russian nuclear energy diplomacy in Finland and Hungary

We compare Russian nuclear energy diplomacy toward Finland and Hungary, where the Russian state corporation Rosatom intends to build nuclear power plants by the 2020s. Russian nuclear energy diplomacy features Rosatom working with other state institutions, its own subsidiaries, and an extensive network of companies and R&D actors to support Russian nuclear power projects abroad. Using the structuration approach, we find three interests driving such diplomacy: energy business and associated profits; modernization of the Russian economy, including the diversification of its export structure; while foreign policy interests are also involved, considering the constraints emerging in EU–Russia energy diplomacy in the oil and gas sectors, including the sanctions since 2014. Some domestic actors in Finland and Hungary make the linkage between nuclear energy and foreign policy as explicit as do some Western commentators. Seeking to pursue these interests, Russian actors must accommodate their considerable assets to the structural constraints they encounter in the target countries. We identify four structural dimensions: the Russian actors are well endowed as regards the resources, technology, and infrastructure dimension; and the dimension of finance, business models, and markets. However, on the institutional dimension, they face a less controllable environment. Regarding the ecological dimension, they must conform to local safety requirements. In both cases, Russian actors were able to strengthen perceptions of joint interests with actors in the target country facilitating the nuclear power plant projects, thereby paving the way for the use of soft power.     

The Implications of Policy Stability for Renewable Energy Innovation in the United States, 1974–2009

Government support and commitment are of particular importance for renewable energy technology innovation activities, which are highly contingent on policy and market uncertainty. The research focus of this article is to examine the relationship between policy stability in public resource allocation and policy outcomes in renewable energy technologies. With time‐series cross‐sectional analyses, we test effects of both the stability and magnitude of federal R&D expenditures on patent applications in five renewable energy sectors (i.e., solar, wind, hydropower, geothermal, and bioenergy) from 1974 to 2009. The findings show that technology innovation is affected by both the magnitude and stability of government financial commitment. Nevertheless, when industries perceive government support over longer time frames, the magnitude effect loses explanatory power to the stability effect. In addition to federal R&D expenditures, policies pertaining to technology commercialization and marketization are a critical determinant of innovation activities. This study demonstrates that incremental, predictable, and credible expenditures facilitate renewable energy technology development. Conversely, a boom‐bust cycle of resource support fails to translate policy goals into intended results.     

Regulatory Stringency and Policy Drivers: A Reassessment of Renewable Portfolio Standards

Renewable energy policy has far‐reaching implications for national and international economic, environmental, and political sustainability, but thus far within the United States it has been almost entirely the province of state governments. This article examines the factors motivating state‐level policymakers to adopt different forms of a renewable portfolio standard (RPS), highlighting the distinction between degrees of policy stringency, ranging from entirely voluntary participation to rigorous and strictly enforced targets. In the process we introduce a new metric for assessing stringency, more precise and reliable than the various proxies used previously, and analyze its relationship to drivers of policy adoption. We find that policies of different stringencies are motivated by systematically different underlying factors. State‐level citizen political ideology is a significant predictor of RPS policy adoption, particularly for “voluntary” and “weak” policy designs. “Strong” policy designs, on the other hand, are best predicted by ideology at the government level, i.e., the degree of institutional liberalism. These findings may inform current implementation and program evaluation efforts, and potentially point the way toward more effective policy choices if and when an RPS moves forward on the national policy agenda, while the stringency metric central to this analysis can be of use to other policy scholars concerned with topics both within and beyond the realm of energy policy.