Abstract

This talk reframes “renewable energy” through political ecology by treating energy and renewability not as neutral technical descriptors, but as historically produced categories tied to modern practices of measurement, commensuration, and control. Rather than assuming energy as a self-evident substance, how does it become thinkable and governable through notions such as work, efficiency, and quantification?—and how “renewables” inherit these abstractions while being presented as moral and technical solutions to multiple socioecological crises. From this perspective, renewability under capitalism is structurally contradictory: decarbonization tends to proceed additively, layering new infrastructures onto existing fossil systems, while remaining entangled with mining, heavy transport, concrete and steel, digitized logistics, and hydrocarbon-dependent production. Large-scale renewables thus operate as “fossil-fuel-plus” arrangements. The talk introduces the notion of “rendering renewable” to name the depoliticizing work that translates heterogeneous socioecological relations into standardized units—energy, carbon, efficiency—so they can circulate through state planning, finance, and corporate accumulation. The talk concludes by proposing “real renewability” as energy autonomy: collective capacity to decide what energy is for, how much is enough, and how to govern it through autogestión and territorial self-determination.

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