Energy System Transformation: Towards an Integrated Geopolitical Economy Framing

Although significantly understudied in IPE and IR, energy is at the start of a profound, large-scale global transformation that will take decades to complete and that is heterogenous, contested, and uncertain in its details and shape. Our interest here in developing a better understanding of the global energy transformation by re-thinking energy geopolitics. Energy geopolitics (GE) is a useful starting point for exploring large-scale change as it has a lot to tell us about the make-up of current energy systems and their important geopolitical outcomes, whilst renewable energy geopolitics (GRE) can tell us about what the international politics of future, renewable based, energy systems might look like. Neither approach, we argue, is sufficient to explore ongoing, messy transformations – i.e. the interactive processes of fossil fuel phase out and phase-in of alternative, low(er) carbon systems. We build on GE and GRE, incorporating insights from constructivist International Political Economy of energy and Socio-technical Transitions literatures, to set out four core aspects, temporal, material, geographic, and political economy, of energy systems under dynamic conditions of transformation. This re-framing of energy geopolitics is less about understanding the political consequences of energy geopolitics, as in GE and GRE realist-inspired accounts, and more about redefining energy whilst it is changing: creating an understanding of energy transformation as involving complex interactions between the four aspects. We then identify and explore interactions across two case studies: one within the ‘high carbon’ transition, the changing roles of gas, and one within the low carbon transition, the uptake of batteries and associated natural resource demands. The aspiration here is to build towards an integrated geopolitical economy of energy transformation framework and we see this paper as a key step: it shows empirically (via the cases) how these the aspects of energy system change interact and illustrates the value of aiming for a more integrated and dynamic approach.