Wind Struggles: Grabbing Value and Cultivating Dignity in Southern Catalonia

ABSTRACT

In Spain, wind energy development has followed a centralized, extractivist model, with wind farms concentrated in peripheralized and impoverished rural territories. Wind developers benefit from these regions’ low land value and lack of political power, thus reproducing patterns of geographical hierarchy and strengthening processes of uneven development. This paper examines these dynamics as they have unfolded in Southern Catalonia, a poor, rural area that concentrates a vast array of energy infrastructure. My ethnographic description focuses on what I call practices of devaluation: the variety of mechanisms through which wind energy companies erode both the economic value and the cultural worth of these regions, especially the land and the livelihoods it supports. Resistance to wind energy development in Southern Catalonia thus emerges as a reaction against these practices of devaluation, that is to say, as struggles to assert worth and preserve value. Overall, I argue that local experiences and cultural frameworks surrounding energy infrastructure reveal the inequities of existing processes of energy transition while foregrounding alternative logics to the dominant extractivist model.

KEYWORDS:

• Wind energy
• devaluation
• extractivism
• uneven development
• rural territory

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The total number of interviewees is 94 (several interviews included more than one person), with the following breakout: 19 environmental and energy activists, 16 mayors and other local officials, 11 wind energy developers and engineers, and 6 local scholars, with the rest being local population that was involved in or affected by wind energy development.

2 Nowadays, the county hosts 181 wind turbines, distributed in 8 wind farms and with an installed capacity of 280 MW; four more wind farms totaling upwards of 100 MW are in the works. Data obtained from Asociación Empresarial Eólica: www.aeeolica.org/sobre-la-eolica/la-eolica-espana/mapa-de-parques-eolicos.

3 This figure is based on the analysis of the actas de expropriación (the juridical documents that register the process of land expropriation) kept in the municipality of Fatarella. Since I did not get access to the archives of neighboring municipalities, the percentage I offer refers to the one wind farm entirely located within the administrative territory of Fatarella. However, the partial documentation I consulted from the other two wind farms suggests similar ballpark percentages.