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 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 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.