Storifying Samsø’s Renewable Energy Transition

ABSTRACT

Through a joint community effort Denmark’s Renewable Energy Island Samsø became self-sufficient with renewable energy over a period of 10 years from 1997 to 2007. Today, the story about Samsø’s successful energy transition has become a global export and a widely known model of community building, public participation and shared ownership in renewable energy technologies and transition processes. What has allowed the Samsø narrative to travel so widely has been the effective ‘transition story’ created about the islanders’ efforts. This transition story, however, has become fixed with the years and has assumed an ideal-typical character. Meanwhile, the challenges and costs inherent in the complicated socio-material process of transition are underestimated and largely forgotten. While such transition stories are indeed inspiring, the ideal-typical narrative may stand in the way of the development of further local energy transitions, as challenging elements of the process are downplayed to strengthen the narrative power of the story. Ethnographic stories about Samsø complicate the island’s transition narrative and add nuance to the Samsø story, highlighting its discrepancies and problematizing the effects of such well-crafted transition narratives. This tendency toward the ‘storification’ of transition processes is not restricted to Samsø; it is employed as a tactics by environmental organizations operating globally.

KEYWORDS:

• ethnography
• transition stories
• renewable energy
• local energy transitions

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Brit Winthereik and Kristin Asdal for their thoughtful and engaged comments and criticisms of earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Irina Papazu is an assistant professor at the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy at Copenhagen Business School with a PhD from the Department of Political Science at University of Copenhagen. She has been a visiting researcher at the Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process at Goldsmiths, University of London, and in the Technologies in Practice research group at the IT University in Copenhagen.

Notes

1 This is an ideal-typical version of the REI story which follows the one in Papazu (2016b). Being a story, references are generally not added, but some sources will be suggested in the endnotes. For a longer and beautifully written version, see Turner, 2007, pp. 27–44.

2 Bünger (1997).

3 Hermansen, fieldnotes, November 2013 and Hermansen and Nørretranders (2013).

4 See Samsø Energiselskab et al. (1997) and Hermansen et al. (2007).

5 Hermansen and Nørretranders (2013), pp. 125–133.