Illiberal Energies and the Generativity of Ambivalence in Germany's Energy Transition

This paper engages illberal attitudes toward liberal technoscientific projects, and more specifically, toward civic power generation schemes in Germany’s transition from nuclear to renewable energy. The German “energy turn” was designed as a springboard to sustainability in social as well as environmental terms, hinging on small-scale power generation projects that allow people to produce the power they consume through solar panel installation, investment in wind parks, or biofuel production. The transition is thus hailed as a means of increasing civic engagement and economic profit on the local level, particularly in rural areas where farmers are beset by falling milk prices and nitrate contamination. Yet while the transition has precipitated a seismic shift in energy use and production—Germans draw roughly 30% of their power from renewables, and nearly half of these installations are citizen-owned—the social implications of this process are uncertain. My long-term research in one region transformed through wind, solar and biofuel development indicates that citizen participation in civic power generation schemes is surprisingly uneven, due not only to the cost of investing in renewable technology, but also to widespread ambivalence about the transition and its promises.  Drawing upon perspectives in public culture studies, science studies, and affect theory, this paper details how such ambivalence, and particularly disinterest and skepticism toward renewables, is reproduced in the midst of projects intended to raise civic engagement. I argue that Germans’ ambivalent feelings point to an alternate understanding of resiliency, one that simultaneously evades and unsettles policy models oriented to liberal democratic participation.