By Dr Briony Wickes, Department of English
Relevant United Nations SDG goals:
Recent conversations around the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy are strikingly ‘down to earth’, focusing on the potentialities of oceans, forests, rivers, fields, and skies. Commentators across the political spectrum agree that global energy futures will be guaranteed by healthier and seemingly inexhaustible alternatives to oil, including green hydrogen, solar energy, biofuels, and wind power, all of which can be harnessed from and within familiar natural environments. “Potential renewable energy sources are available all around us,” captions the introductory video to COP27’s Energy Day, accompanied by footage of the sun rising over alpine forests [Fig 1]. The video’s promise is immediate, responding to the urgency of adopting alternative energy systems through its suggestion that viable solutions are already at our fingertips (rustling through the leaves, bubbling in the waters, bathing our faces in warmth and light), but it keeps its focus on the future. The clean energy transition is ‘just over the horizon’, it encourages, and will comprise a frictionless movement from scarcity to abundance, made possible by the technologies and innovations of the twenty-first century.
[Fig 1] ‘Thematic Days: Energy’, COP27, https://youtu.be/dyOjVQG9Rck. Accessed 10 November 2022.
Whilst the dialogues and actions that emerge from Energy Day on Tuesday 15 November 2022 will centre on plans for transformative energy futures, it remains important not to lose sight of energy economies and discourses of the past. Many of the trailblazing ways to store, transport, integrate, and convert renewable energy nevertheless remain attached to infrastructures of the fossil fuel era, and thus to their legacies of colonial extractivism, dispossession, toxicity, and labour exploitation. As members of the activist research collective After Oil make clear, the transition to renewable energy is hardly ever a clean break.
Nor is it a case of simply looking forward. Despite categorisation as ‘future technologies’, energy systems like solar, wind, and hydropower have long histories in literature and science. The first solar engines were used in the 1870s, for example, and solar panels appeared one decade later. The power of the sun is examined in the criticism of John Ruskin (1819-1900); the art of J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851); and the literary work of Charles Dickens (1812-1870), H.G. Wells (1866-1946), and Rokeya Hossain (1880-1932). Investments were also being made in the energy potential of water. In 1889 at the Exposition Universelle the engineer Aristide Bergès (1833-1904) exhibited a hydroelectricity system that he called “Houille Blanche” or “White Coal” [Fig 2]. This name emphasises the significance of hydropower in nineteenth century imaginary, as well as signalling some of the ways in which energy transitions were being conceived – as organic, reinvigorating, and fluid. Solar was likewise perceived as clean and boundless. In a 1907 pamphlet, the ‘solar pioneer’ Frank Schuman (1862-1918) explains:
“We dig far into the ground to get [coal], whereas the sun is delivering an equal power every day, right at our doors, free of all charge. It is only necessary for us to devise the proper means for receiving this infinite power and using it to advantage”.
Schuman’s optimism prefigures the utopian impulse that underpins many twenty-first century discussions of renewable energy. This is not to devalue the urgency of addressing the energy trilemma in our unique time of global crisis, nor to deny the significant advances that have been made in the transition to low-carbon energy systems. But it raises, as literature scholars Allen MacDuffie and Elizabeth Miller argue, some of the structural continuities between past and present energy eras: “on some level,” MacDuffie avers, “[Victorian] myths are ours”. It also reframes energy transition as a question of cultural representation, as well as of finance, technology, government policy, etc. How we envision and relate to historical and contemporary energy systems matters, and these imaginaries have material effects. As Energy Humanities scholars Imre Szeman and Caleb Wellum discuss, having “shaped ourselves into creatures of petromodernity inhabiting a global petroleumscape” approximating energy transition goes beyond ‘leaving oil in the ground’, and requires ongoing interrogation of the shape, form, and character of all historical and future energy systems. Doing so may reveal the pathway to renewable energy to be more clouded, but it will hopefully lead in turn to long-term changes in the forms of energy that we employ, and a future that is more just, sustainable, and bright.
[Fig 2.] Water as White Coal, Poster of the Grenoble Congress Hydropower and Tourism Exhibition, 1925. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Exposition_houille_blanche_-_Grenoble.jpg
Bio: Dr Briony Wickes is a Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Sustainability in the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research interests are in the environmental humanities, animal studies, histories of colonialism, and the nineteenth-century novel. She has an article forthcoming on solar infrastructures and the nineteenth-century imagination in a special issue of Victorian Literature and Culture, and is currently designing a course on ‘Environmental Literatures’ for undergraduate students at RHUL.