Decentralization, Climate Change, and the Future of Energy in Rural America

FAIN: FT-291203-23

Joanne Randa Nucho
Pomona College (Claremont, CA 91711-4434)

Research and writing leading to a book on how the rise of localized energy grids fueled by sustainable energy sources is disenfranchising rural communities in California.

The early electric utilities in the US were local Edison companies and municipal agencies. In the 1930s, the New Deal wired up the countryside, greatly expanding people’s access through three immense Super Grids across the nation. But now climate change disruptions and new energy sources challenge Super Grid dominance, especially in the world’s fifth-largest economy, California. My ethnography of the imagined futures at play in a moment of transition in California is my starting point for addressing broader questions about what is at stake in sustainable energy transition in the US and around the world in a post-grid turn. This project focuses on the competing visions of California activists, micro-gridders, experts, and officials at tech companies and public agencies involved in the localization of renewable energy to analyze what is at stake for the grid and notions of citizenship, belonging and exclusion around electricity as a public good.