Social visions to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy sources have motivated unprecedented growth in global renewable energy manufacturing. Previous literature shows that people committed to realizing such visions have difficulties reconciling with the negative social-ecological impacts of this mass production even if it presents a formidable challenge to a socially just and ecologically sustainable energy transition. This study contributes to a better understanding of how stakeholders view the promises and perils of large-scale renewable energy development. It draws on the petroculure literature to understand how stakeholder viewpoints of deep geothermal energy technology may be a product of the historically unparalleled energy throughput since the mid-20th century. The study relies on Q-methodology for identifying viewpoints among stakeholders in deep geothermal energy in Sweden. The results demonstrate a notable influence of petrocultural assumptions, which helps to explain how stakeholders obfuscate the materiality of renewable energy technologies. This suggests that social visions to replace fossil fuels with technologically sophisticated renewable energy systems could themselves be cultural products of the fossil era inclined to reproduce it.

Solar photovoltaic (PV) technology is rapidly emerging as a cost-effective option in the world economy. Governments, corporations, and grassroots actors are promoting solar PV power in the hope of transforming the fossil-based energy regime and mitigating climate change. However, reports about miserable working conditions, environmentally deleterious mineral extraction, and toxic waste dumps corrode the image of a problem-free future based on solar power. The research is contradictory and the environmental movement is divided. Meanwhile, few are asking fundamental questions about what solar PV technology is from the perspective of global inequalities and asymmetric resource flows in world trade. Building on insights from ecological economics and philosophy of technology, the book offers a novel interdisciplinary approach to understand the contradictory nature of solar PV technology. Its central question is whether ‘ecologically unequal exchange’ – an asymmetric transfer of labor time and natural resources – is a necessary condition for solar PV development. The findings demonstrate how large-scale development of solar PV technology may require global asymmetries as much as polysilicon, electrical components, engineers, or direct sunshine. To the extent that decisionmakers disregard this, it may be a symptom of ‘machine fetishism,’ which masks the global asymmetries of the emerging energy regime while also preventing us from grasping what modern technology ultimately is. This forces us to seriously consider to what degree a long-term sustainable relation to the biosphere can be reached through endless economic expansion, as implied in proposals for “green growth” or various “green technologies,” and to what degree it can only be reached by a progressive degrowth with attention to well-being, justice, and ecological limits. The book makes a strong case for the latter. 

Global installations of solar photovoltaic (PV) technology have reached unprecedented levels and is expected to further rise in the coming decades. Conventional interpretations have neglected international trade flows and the globally uneven valuation of labor and resources as relevant for the commercialization of solar PV technology. This study challenges these interpretations by assessing whether the rapid increase in solar power was based an uneven flow of resources in the world economy. The study relies on an LCA-based account of ecologically unequal exchange in two focal PV commodities between Germany and China 2002–2018. The results show how this trade was characterized by an intensifying rate of ecologically unequal exchange, which gradually improved Germany's prospect of installing solar PV modules at the expense of increasing environmental loads in China. This environmental load displacement contributed to 15 times lower production costs per watt and considerably higher EROI (from 2.2:1 to 77:1) and power density (from 4.3 W/m2 to 143 W/m2) in Germany. The study concludes that ecologically unequal exchange may have been integral to the global rise of solar power and cautions that environmental load displacements may be inherent to the success of social metabolisms reliant upon solar energy harnessed through PV technology.

The potential of geothermal energy for energy transition is increasingly recognized by governments around the world. Whether geothermal energy is a sustainable source of heat and/or electricity depends on how it is deployed in specific contexts. Therefore, it is striking that there is only limited attention to geothermal energy from a social science and humanities (SSH) perspective. Geothermal energy is largely conceptualized as a technological and/or geological issue in both science and practice. This perspective article aims to go beyond such conceptualizations by positioning social science research as an important lens to explore the promises and pitfalls of geothermal energy. We first provide an overview of the current state of geothermal energy as a decarbonization strategy. Second, we move on to review the existing literature. This review shows that studies that do address geothermal energy from an SSH perspective tend to be of a descriptive nature and lack analytical diversity. Third, we discuss three complementary theoretical approaches that are used in the social sciences to observe and address other forms of energy and energy transition. We believe that socio-technical assemblages, systems, and imaginaries can provide fruitful analytical lenses to study the promises, pitfalls and spatialization of geothermal energy. We conclude the paper with a research agenda and call for further engagement with this topic in SSH research, with attention to specificities of global South and North contexts.