Tinkering with Turbines: Ethics and Energy Decentralization in Scotland

Abstract

This article builds on literature exploring the entanglements between socio-political life and energy to consider how alternative, more decentralized arrangements of electricity production, delivery, and use might affect how humans relate to one another and to non-human worlds, or trouble existing formations of power and governance. In particular, it considers how two distinct modalities of local engagement with energy schemes at radically different scales—a Scottish peninsula's 40-year experiment with off-grid micro-wind turbines and the community benefit fund arrangements arising from the proposed construction of one of Scotland's largest windfarms—rely upon ethical processes for their material and political operation. I argue that energy decentralization—the gradual, multi-scalar reconfiguration of infrastructures and power relations implied by moves towards greater local involvement in energy production, distribution, and use—necessitates an ethical mode that disrupts fixed moral claims in favor of the ongoing negotiation of infrastructural open-endedness and continued attempts to work across difference and uncertainty.