In the context of challenging targets for renewable energy generation, this paper draws
out social implications of moves towards low carbon energy systems. As renewable
energy develops as a heterogeneous category, many potential forms of social relation
between ‘publics’ and technologies are emerging. Utilising perspectives from science
and technology studies, we outline five modes in which renewable energy has been
implemented in the UK and how these involve different configurations of technology and
social organisation. We argue that a multiplicity of roles for ‘the public’ are implicated
across this increasingly complex landscape, cutting across established categories and
raising questions of meaning, differentiation, interrelation and access. Policy assumptions
and conceptions are questioned, highlighting that dominant characterisations of public
roles have been part of a concentration on particular socio-technical pathways to the
exclusion of others.