The chapter explores the social relations of renewable energy and everyday life in the Indian state of Karnataka, focusing on the 2 GW Pavagada solar energy park, said to be the largest in Asia, and on the experience of wind energy at the local level. It analyses these installations in the historical context of national and state-level energy policy, framed by wider developmental dynamics and stratification in the Karnataka locality. We contrast the renewable ‘resource’ with fossil fuel sources and highlight differences between solar and wind power. We discuss the drive to attract renewable investment to the region, along with development finance, in the context of Karnataka’s development trajectory. We interpret the transition to renewable energy in terms of social structures and the extent to which it exacerbates or alleviates pre-existing social divides. There is a strong focus on implications for land, water, livelihood, caste, gender, and environment, including for instance the role, or displacement, of rural landless and lower-caste groups.

The Introduction sets the rationale and parameters for the study. The rationale begins with the growing climate crisis and the urgent necessity to decarbonise energy. It outlines the limits of the current assumption that private sector investment can deliver the required decarbonisation. Public legitimacy for renewables, we argue, has moved to the centre of the energy transition, requiring stronger forms of social ownership over the emerging energy systems. New roles for the state in decarbonising society are highlighted, along with a ‘re-commoning’ agenda and issues of sufficiency. Finally, the book’s focus on investigating and comparing region-level ‘success’ stories is outlined.

We outline the socio-ecological appropriation of ‘nature’s free gifts’ of wind and sun for renewable energy, understood as a process of capture, which opens a new ‘frontier’ in capital-nature relations. We elaborate on the term ‘nature’s free gifts’, originally derived from Marx, and its use in Marxist approaches to ecology and social theory as documented by Saito (2022). Second, we highlight the process of securing a spatial, temporal, and social ‘fix’ for large-scale renewables, to enable accumulation, and as an emerging aspect of rivalry between region-level authorities and developers to reap the rewards of the renewable energy transition. Third, we focus on the social relations of renewable accumulation, encompassing state authorities, corporates, workers, landowners, and communities, engaged in a contest to define models for renewable transition and lay claim to ‘nature’s free gifts’. These three strands are used to develop a conceptual model to interpret the social legitimacy of renewable transition and to guide the comparative analysis.

The chapter centres on the expansion of wind power and the subsequent ‘solar rush’ in the German ‘energy state’ of Brandenburg, where the energy transition (or Energiewende) has been underway for more than two decades. We follow the unfolding process of renewable energy development and socio-ecological capture, paying particular attention to the changing scale of operations exemplified by a move to larger wind turbines and the current shift to large-scale solar farms. The chapter provides a rich account of the nexus between a well-established renewables sector and other forms of land use, such as leisure, aesthetics, agriculture, or forestry. The conflict between narratives of regional and local development, prompted, defined, and mobilised in the energy transition, is seen as opening new fields of engagement and disputation in the emerging ‘green’ economy.

The chapter tracks the field of renewable energy transition in the three sub-national states where the ethnographic studies are located: Karnataka, Brandenburg, and South Australia. It applies the conceptual model outlined in Chapter 1 to address the full scope of the transition in these regions. The model is used to analytically ‘unbundle’ the dimensions of transition in the three contrasting regions of study, allowing deeper understanding of the relations in play. The chapter focuses on each state in turn, providing historical and contemporary data about renewable energy policy-making and development at the region level in the context of national authorities and global institutions and agencies. We demonstrate the process of renewable ‘capture’ by capital, but also how it is contested and the extent to which it prefigures more democratic social relations and new ‘forms of collective life’.

The Conclusions widen the lens to develop a series of substantive recommendations for policymakers, regional, national, and global, who are seeking to strengthen public legitimacy for electricity decarbonisation. It also seeks to draw out implications, in the long haul, for recasting socio-ecological relations under climate change in more democratic directions, to realise its fullest potential for societal transformation, and democratic engagement. As with energy transitions in the past, the current juncture offers manifold (still undreamt-of) possibilities: we argue for a transition regime that allows for such possibilities to be fostered and realised. There is capacity and agency for distributed renewables, for energy transformations and new forms of energy social ownership and democratisation, in other words, for a ‘re-commoning’ of socio-ecological relations.

The chapter focuses on South Australia’s Upper Spencer Gulf region in South Australia, which now aspires to 500% renewable energy by 2050. The state has access to world-best onshore wind and solar, with downstream industrial linkages that are now fuelling new spatio-temporal planning horizons. While the state promotes the new energy industry as a ‘green’ industrial economy, ethnographic research reveals mixed outcomes. Local socio-ecological relations are changing favourably for some groups, such as for host landowners and Aboriginal native title holders. Others find themselves left out or further marginalised. Post-construction, renewable energy installations offer few jobs, in localities where unemployment rates are high. Dissatisfaction erupts during the project application processes, where the limits of local demands for meaningful involvement, equitable sharing of benefits, and accountable planning regulation become clear. These, we argue, pose significant threats to the social legitimacy of renewable energy.

This chapter centres on comparative analysis, drawing together evidence-based insights into how renewable energy has been developed in the three regions. The three-part framework outlined in the opening chapter is used to analyse problems of legitimacy in renewable energy development in the three contexts. The three dimensions of appropriation, accumulation, and regulation shape the comparative analysis and underpin a suggested schema for interpreting legitimacy issues in renewable energy transitions. We discuss how renewables have been progressed, both locally and in terms of the intersecting dynamics of global policy, finance, and advocacy in constituting region-level transitions.

Chapter 1 introduces the book’s main theme, namely the growing global contest over the future of coal. Three main aspects are identified – the changing world-historical status of coal as the fuel of development, the shifting significance of the coal commodity in economic growth, and its impact as a central driver of climate change and ecological exhaustion. Government-led development ideology remains closely bound up with the extraction of coal as a source of energy security, yet is increasingly exposed and contested. Increased populist rejection of climate policy in the name of fossil fuel reliance reflects the growing intensity of this contest. Pro-coal political forces gain most traction where they are most threatened, in high-income coal-producing countries such as in the US, Canada and Australia, as well as in the EU. In newly industrialising contexts with lower emissions targets, such as in India, coal is challenged by new low-cost renewable energy, and by immediate health imperatives.

Chapter 8 develops a series of comparative themes from the experience of coal and climate change in India, Australia and Germany. In each country, we find that coal’s legitimacy crisis has created sharp contradictions in wider society, as well as within state institutions, and that local contests over new mines are rapidly undermining the social value of coal. Coal’s value to ‘development’ reflects its cultural narration as a valuable commodity and source of energy and in concluding we chart the way these narratives are contested, and are changing. In particular the chapter shows how anti-coal groups have gained strategic traction in the context of growing contradictions in national climate and energy policy. In this we return to the book’s initial provocation, expressed in the coal conundrum of increased coal extraction coupled with climate instability, arguing the conundrum is on the way to being resolved, for a post-coal future.

Chapter 4 focusses on proposed brown coal mines for Lusatia, a region of Eastern Germany on the Polish border. The mines aimed to extend existing concessions, supplying coal for the nearby power generators. They were owned by the Swedish state-owned corporation Vattenfall, which sold them to a Czech conglomerate in 2016. The developmentalist argument for the mining is addressed first, especially in terms of its strategic value for German ‘energy security’. We examine the debates about coal’s economic necessity as a ‘transition fuel’ in Germany’s Energiewende, and its environmental or climate impacts. These themes are then developed in analysing the governance framework for the mine approval and opposition to it. The chapter shows how local opponents mobilise established conceptions of home or ‘heimat’ against the mining. These scripts, centred on local values of belonging in place, are integrated with concerns about impacts on livelihood and environment, and with concerns about climate change. The direct contradiction between Germany’s post-industrial ‘green economy’ and its determination to expand emissions-intensive brown coal is particularly powerful, not least as it destabilises technocratic authority.