hing LtdCarbon reduction, ‘the public’ and renewable
energy: engaging with socio-technical
configurations
Gordon Walker and Noel Cass
Department of Geography, Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YQ
Email: g.p.walker@lancaster.ac.uk
Revised manuscript received 6 July 2007
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.
Key words: renewable energy, public, socio-technical configurations, UK
Introduction
It has become increasingly clear that to make the
major carbon reductions being called for to mitigate
future climate change there will need to be moves
towards energy systems that incorporate a far greater
use of renewable energy technologies (Stern 2007;
European Union Council 2007). Such emerging
energy systems will, at least in the medium term,
take a hybrid form, with large-scale coal, gas and
nuclear generation operated alongside more distributed
and multi-scaled configurations of renewable energy
technologies. What this might imply for technical
engineering, regulation and market performance is
being increasingly discussed in the academic and
policy literatures (e.g. Pehnt et al. 2006; Sauter and
Watson 2007; Willis 2006). However, there are also
profound social and geographical implications
embedded within emerging patterns of renewable
energy utilisation that need to be examined,
understood and assessed in relation to current and
future renewable energies policy. Our particular
concern here is with the relations between renewable
energy technologies and ‘the public’ – cast in various
guises and groups (Walker 1999) – and the multiple
roles and forms of engagement that are being
produced as the social organisation of renewable
energy technologies evolves and differentiates.
In this paper we draw on perspectives developed
in science and technology studies to consider how
changes in the deployment of renewable energy in
the UK require a far more embedded and multidimensional
conceptualisation of the roles, engagements
and potentiality of ‘the public’ within the energy
system. We show how as renewable energy develops
as a heterogeneous category of multiple sites, scales
and forms, and as more distributed systems of
provision and co-provision emerge (Van Vliet et al.