Alternative Forms of Energy Production and Political Reconfigurations: The Political Sociology of Alternative Energies as a Study of Potentialities of Collective Reorganization

Energy choices that are made in a society are first and foremost political choices. According to those choices, different forms of access to energy will take place and engage users in more or less binding chains of relationships and more or less heavy situations of dependency. How then can new technological developments contribute to a redistribution of possibilities (by accompanying new ways of thinking, by disturbing and eroding routines, by extending and changing practices ...) and subsequently to social reorganization? Compared to fossil fuels and electricity production methods that have accompanied the development of industrial capitalism, certain energy production methods related to alternative sources (wind, solar, etc.) seem to have such a potential of reconfiguration. The reopening of technical possibilities seems to enable the challenging and displacement of dominant logics. It gives people opportunities to overcome some constraints and to develop new resources. In such a process, socio-technical networks are reconfigured out of certain previously instituted logics, while exploring other paths. Starting from the study of the technological solutions currently being explored and the organizational patterns associated with the exploitation of renewable resources, this contribution aims at highlighting these logics and the possibilities to displace and modify them, while showing the usefulness of a sociology of networks and flows. Indeed, energy alternatives seem to enable a series of changes: - from centralization to decentralization (reconfiguration of polarizations) - from distance to proximity (reconfiguration of scales) - from dependency to self-sufficiency (reconfiguration of relations to “large technical systems” It is not a question of returning to a technological determinism of sorts. Therefore, this research actually aims at studying what might be termed “technological potentialism,” as this entails thinking in terms of conditions of actualization—notably, adaptability of techniques, acceptability by the people, and possibilities of appropriation. In other words, this potentialism does not depend on an essence, intrinsic nature or autonomous force of technics, but rather on the way interested actors will be able to open up or find new opportunities in technological advances or so far unexplored technological solutions. If technology should be taken into account, it is not only as material devices, but also as elements embedded in socio-technical systems, in which infrastructures, producers, users, consumers, regulators and other intermediaries are themselves entangled Three steps are proposed to show that, while the development of alternative energies depends on technological advances, it can, in this process, also reveal political potentialities. At first, we will clarify the theoretical arguments in favour of an approach in terms of “technological potentialism.” Then, we will extend this approach by identifying a set of potentialities linked with renewable energies—which mostly can be used as arguments legitimizing such energies—and the model that could arise from these alternative forms or approaches. Finally, we will examine how these potentialities could find paths to become effective.