Blog

Katja Müller
20th November 2019

What happens if you put 20+ researchers and activists on energy and environment in a room for two days? You will have pretty much one topic that runs through the session, tea breaks, lunch and dinner: the shift to renewable energies and the way it should, could and is currently done.

Last week (from November 12th to 13th), the IIT Kanpur’s Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, in cooperation with the Climate Justice Research Centre at the University of Technology Sydney and the Center for Interdisciplinary Area Studies at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg held an International Workshop on socio-ecological relations of energy transitions. The workshop showed that there is a pressing need to come together and discuss energy transition across countries and disciplines. We had participants working and reporting on the transition in Germany, Australia and, most prominently, India; and these participants work for university, policy driven/driving research centres, NGOs, the government, and independently. It hence comes at not surprise that there was an eager will to learn from each other when it comes to experiences and methods, but also scrutiny of statements, (preliminary) outcomes, and opinions.

One of the core themes was India’s shift to renewables in the last decade. Priya Pillai, Vinuta Gopal, Sumedha Pal, as well as Devleena Ghosh gave insights on the experiences with installing solar and wind on the ground, and laid open how landowners, landless farmers and Adivasi people deal with large scale solar power plants and wind farms. To some extent, issues known from coal mining – for example injustice in contracts, promises of jobs unfulfilled, land grab, and water shortage – seem to be repeated. Hence, an energy transformation alone, in the sense of moving from one resource to another without changing structures of energy production, does not suffice. But Ashok Srinivas points out that the shift to renewables is economically driven – i.e. the development of solar and wind in particular is due to the fact that it is an investment generating comparatively high revenue. It shows not least in other parts of the energy sector, such as distribution, where privately owned companies supply to the masses in the city and make profits, while the government is distributing electricity in rural and other areas, where losses are easier to come about not least through the long transmission distances to be covered.

Energy production and distribution, as Ashwini K Swain and Parth Bhatia stressed, has further political dimensions, and the energy transition is deteriorating from political problems. Beyond redistribution, these lay in federalism and electricity gigantism: Control over energy is distributed between nation and states, and capital remains centralized. However, as they also make clear, renewable energy has disruptive power, and could be a way to break up established economies, as it is modular, cost-competitive, low-carbon emitting, and intermittent. But electricity is not only an electoral currency – its production is especially a public power. And when it comes to decarbonisation, resistance and anxiety loom large in coal producing areas.

Ruchi Gupta explained that the exit from coal in places such as Betul in Madhya Pradesh causes economic as well as social distress: she names illegal mining, rise in crime, anxiety and depression, as well as a skewed labour market with youth unemployment and distressed migration. Likewise – and here we include perspectives from outside India – the exit from coal in Germany is perceived as an immense challenge for areas that have a long history and dependency – be it economic or culturally – on coal mining. Relating back to the political issue, it becomes clear that the financial means of the German government to cushion the ‘structural change’ of the exit from coal are far higher than India’s. Gupta’s co-presenter Thomas Spencer pointed out that political decision making and structural support in India need to focus on the agricultural sector, where much larger transitions are taking place. But if his macroeconomic perspective, where the exit from coal being seems not so big an issue should lead to refrain from a the anticipated ‘premature deindustrialisation’ was certainly subject to debate.

India’s political instruments to direct and steer the transition from coal mining to renewables are not yet analyzed, as Gopal Sarangi makes clear. There are multiple instruments for the government to do so, not least since 60% of the coal is owned by the state, and renewable energy is mostly privately owned. What this shift in ownership leads to and the government policies implemented for renewable energy remain subjects to be investigated. Are they effective, efficient or promoting equality? Gopal Sarangi’s preliminary analyses show a strong tendency to the developers and supply side.

Sarangi thereby touched upon the larger issue of the workshop, that the other contributors also drew on: How can a sector, as complex and with a multitude of stakeholders, scales and levels as energy production be transformed in a way, that is not only economically feasible, but politically and administratively implementable, and socially just? The workshop laid open the entanglements of the socio-political and socio-economic relations, pointing out Australia’s, Germany’s and India’s potentials and problems. It illustrated that all three countries are democracies with their own pathways away from coal and towards renewables, yet all of them currently experience severe setbacks. That these setbacks are (also) due to the respective governments and stakeholders not making full use of the socio-political capacities to envision and implement energy transformations as broader transitions, is one of the workshop’s main outcomes.