Decolonizing energy: Black Lives Matter and technoscientific expertise amid solar transitions

With the advent of renewables, white-collar energy experts have embraced a holistic, intersectional politics at odds with the corporate technocratic outlook characteristic of the energy sector. Concomitantly, anti-racist activists have enfolded technocratic energy issues into their intersectional agenda, situating themselves in the technical spaces that produce electricity. In this paper I argue that renewable energy technologies and the intersectional ethos of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement have operated as a material-discursive node, enabling these coterminous shifts. These shifts are also challenging dominant understandings of what energy fundamentally is amid burgeoning efforts to “democratize” energy. I contend that BLM presents a framework through which we can more radically decolonize energy. Highlighting the historical imbrications of slavery and industrialized energy generation, I argue that colonialism transformed energy - the ability to change matter - into a commoditized form that made certain lives not matter. This framework suggests that pervasive understandings of energy reify colonial hierarchies. As such, I call for intersectional work that reconceptualizes energy in terms of vital relationality. By unleashing energy from its colonial context, we can begin to disentangle the systems through which we change matter from the systems through which certain lives are made to not matter.