POWER DISRUPTIONS: ITALIAN DISTRIBUTED ENERGY POLITICS, ENERGY TRANSITIONS AND THE NEW MATERIALISMS

Abstract

This thesis follows an energy transition in-the-making. It examines the decentralisation of the power system in Italy, focusing on the material politics of this sociotechnical change. After sketching the outlines of this transition - the proliferation of renewable distributed energy technologies into a conventionally centralised electricity grid, and the circulation of novel energy practices and processes of prosumption amongst the Italian public – it builds on composite literature across the social sciences to show the conceptual and empirical lacunae that spur the rational for this research. The thesis uses the instability of Italy’s balance of power between regions and central government as an amplifying lens able to highlight how powerful sociotechnical phenomena assemble and reassemble the social. Following an ethico-onto-epistemology gleaned from New Materialist theories that produces a sensibility to the more-than-human, this thesis enacts different agential cuts to answer how sociotechnical change is imbricated in sociopolitical transformations. It shows the energy transition in-the-making that it follows to be re-assembling the state, influencing energy governance, and contributing to the emergence of new sociotechnical imaginaries of energy in Italy by participating in a critical juncture in time. Its insights come from theoretical engagement with interdisciplinary literatures and from fieldwork research that made use of relational ethnography, semi-structured interviews and tracing the sociomaterial in digital and physical spaces.