Participatory Innovation: Storying the Renewable Energy Island Samsø
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Participatory Innovation: Storying the Renewable Energy Island Samsø Irina Papazu PhD Dissertation Department of Political Science University of Copenhagen January 2016 Table of contents Preface 4 Acknowledgements 8 1. Introduction 10 Clarifications: Theory, methods and contributions 20 Storytelling as appreciative engagement 20 Three basic stories about ANT 22 A note on knowledge formation 24 Overview of chapters and articles 26 2. Becoming Denmark’s Renewable Energy Island 32 3. The island laboratory 44 The island as test site 47 The making of a model 52 Different modes of generalization 55 4. STS as empirical philosophy 60 STS and political science 66 An empirical attitude to politics 69 Politics and democracy as collective world-making 72 Democracy as collective self-governance: Reinventing the island 73 5. Participatory methods 80 Fieldwork, or How to hold realities steady? 84 Interviews and documents, or How to account for past events? 89 Doing interviews on Samsø 90 Assembling a digital archive 94 2 Analysis/Writing, or How to choose between accounts? 99 Three Tables for overview 106 6. Bibliography 113 Paper 1 Demonstrating Doability: The Networking Practices of a Danish Renewable Energy Island 129 Paper 2 Transition Stories and Their Ethnographic Counterparts: Samsø’s Renewable Energy Transition 167 Paper 3 Management Through Hope: An ethnography of Denmark’s Renewable Energy Island 200 Paper 4 Authoring Participation 226 Paper 5 Nearshore Wind Resistance on Denmark’s Renewable Energy Island: Not Another NIMBY Story 261 Appendix 1: English summary 299 Appendix 2: Resumé (Danish summary) 301 Appendix 3: Abstract 303 3 Preface In 1997 Samsø, an island of four thousand inhabitants nestled in the Kattegat Strait between Jutland and Sealand, embarked on a ten-year-long journey toward becoming Denmark’s Renewable Energy Island. Denmark’s Minister for the Environment Svend Auken returned from Kyoto Climate Talks in Japan eager for Denmark to reduce its CO 2 emissions and show itself as a responsible climate actor. Having abandoned nuclear power in the nineteen-eighties due to the strong Danish anti-nuclear movement, with the oil crises of the seventies attention had turned to the development of wind energy, an industry in which Denmark had become a global frontrunner. The minister announced a competition inviting local island communities to present a realistic plan using Danish renewable technology for how to make a full transition of the island’s energy systems to energy self-sufficiency. With no funds attached, all that Samsø won when it was chosen among three other islands and a peninsula was the title of Renewable Energy Island to Denmark. Ten years later, in 2007, eleven 1-megawatt wind turbines decorate the fields providing the islanders with the electricity they need, and ten 2,3-megawatt offshore wind turbines have been installed to compensate for the islanders’ fossil fuel-dependent transportation needs. Especially the ferries and the farmers’ agricultural equipment are energy-intensive, but one of the island’s two ferries has recently been replaced with a new ferry, powered by liquefied natural gas, the first in Denmark. Sixty percent of the houses on the island are supplied with district heating from the four plants scattered around the island, three of which are straw-fired while the plant on northern Samsø works on solar heat and woodchips from the local forest. The forty percent of Samsø households not within reach of the district heating plants have installed individual heating systems, many of which rely on renewable technologies (see figure 1). 4 This dissertation is composed of five stories about Denmark’s Renewable Energy Island Samsø. Ranging from the local to the global and back to discussions of local rural development, of being peripheral and central, ambitious and down-to-earth, concrete and abstract, each story, in article form, builds on the others, adding new perspectives to the above account of an island which, despite having been scrutinized by interested parties for close to twenty years, has never received an in-depth treatment like the one presented in this thesis. Conceived as an article-based dissertation, it is not, however, my ambition to tell the comprehensive story about Denmark’s Renewable Energy Island. And I would refrain from being so bold as to claim that such a totalizing view of any phenomenon is within reach or desirable (Law 2002). There will be many more stories to tell. But, with all articles emerging from the same data material and shedding light on just one case, the stories told here do combine to draw an internally consistent picture of an experiment in what I have termed participatory innovation . 5 Overview of papers and status of publications 1. Demonstrating Doability: The Networking Practices of a Danish Renewable Energy Island In second review, Demonstrations Journal. 2. Transition Stories and their Ethnographic Counterparts: Samsø’s Renewable Energy Transition Submitted to Science as Culture. 3. Management Through Hope: An Ethnography of Denmark’s Renewable Energy Island In second review, Journal of Organizational Ethnography. 4. Authoring Participation Revise and resubmit to Nordic Journal of Science and Technology. 5. Nearshore Wind Resistance on Denmark’s Renewable Energy Island: Not Another NIMBY Story Accepted for publication, Science and Technology Studies. 6 Figure 1 Samsø in Denmark and map of Samsø’s RE technologies. Source: RE-Regions 7 Acknowledgements I would not be a very good sociologist of associations if I did not acknowledge the long line of people and the networks that have grown out of our engagements which have participated in bringing this project to fruition. For so readily allowing me to participate in their work I thank in particular Michael Larsen, Malene Lunden, Søren Hermansen and the rest of the people at Samsø Energy Academy. For so generously opening their working lives to me, I hope they will be able to identify with the text while also finding something of interest in it. Back on the mainland, in the Department of Political Science I want to thank my supervisor Jens Hoff for his belief in me and his unwavering support. And I thank the PhD group for making the process a lot more fun. Of the PhDs I would particularly like to thank Christian Elling Scheele with whom I wrote my first articles, the political theory group (Ditte, Signe, Theresa, Hans, Esben, Benjamin) for reading Dewey with me, and Alexei Tsinovoi for always insisting on being Political with a capital P! This work is indebted to several other research environments, especially the Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process (CSISP), Goldsmiths, University of London. Here, I am incredibly grateful to Noortje Marres for her willingness to seriously engage with my texts and her ability to push my analyses and arguments forward. For making my stay at CSISP possible I gratefully acknowledge the financial support from Augustinus Fonden, Knud Højgaards Fond, Oticon Fonden and Samsø Fonden. In the Technologies in Practice research group at the IT-University of Copenhagen, where I have spent quite a lot of time and have felt incredibly welcome, I would especially like to thank Anne Kathrine Pihl Vadgaard, Lea Schick, Rachel Douglas-Jones, Brit Ross Winthereik and Christopher Gad. For offering his help at pivotal times I thank Anders Blok. I had inspiring, fun and sometimes stressful times playing around with the term ‘political STS’ with the WGPS group (Anne Kathrine Pihl Vadgaard and Andreas Birkbak), so a great thanks to you. Last but not least, a big thank you to my friends, my family and my yoga teacher Eskil for keeping me sane and relatively poised throughout these three years! 8 Part 1: Dissertation framework 9 1. Introduction “This is an island and therefore Unreal” (W. H. Auden, Letters from Iceland 1937 , in Lezaun 2011) Søren Hermansen: “The islanders don’t like new things. We are sceptical people.” Visitor: “But the Renewable Energy Island project, that was new!” Søren Hermansen: “The Renewable Energy Island project wasn’t new. It built on well-known principles of self-sufficiency, good housekeeping, harnessing local resources. It wasn’t wave technology!” (Conversation, Samsø 2013) This dissertation is about a demonstration experiment in local green energy transitions. It is about how the Danish island Samsø accomplished a community-based energy transformation 1 and how Samsø managed to break the isolation that is the island condition and become a well-known demonstration project. An island surrounded by water must work hard to create the conditions that will allow its experiences to proliferate. But Samsø succeeded not only in becoming self-sufficient with renewable energy, but also in becoming influential. From Japan to EU institutions, the White House and Danish ‛Climate Municipalities’, Denmark’s Renewable Energy Island Samsø is a rolemodel, a frontrunner and signpost for the energy transitions to come. Samsø exists in the tension described by the two quotations above, one is from a poem, the other a snippet of conversation between the local Samsø project director and a visitor. At once down-to-earth, practical and pragmatic, and a meeting place and role model of idealists and climate change activists from all over the world dreaming of a more sustainable future, Samsø connects poles: pragmatism and idealism, hope and practicality, future and past. It is this tension that this dissertation navigates. The thesis is based on five months of fieldwork carried out in the fall of 2013 and early summer of 2014 on Samsø. Following the two extensive periods of fieldwork I 1 I will use the words “transition” and “transformation” interchangeably. 10 kept in contact with Samsø Energy Academy, the environmental consultancy where I had a desk and spent most of my time, joining the staff for meetings, seminars and conferences on Samsø, in Copenhagen and Aarhus until the conclusion of my PhD.