Energy territories and right to the system : collective agency infrastructure

Global infrastructuralization has generated complex supply chains, and international policies and laws which have transformed energy extraction, production and distribution. This system is made up of sites of production in the global periphery and sites of consumption in the global urban cores, connected by essentially invisible network of infrastructure and instruments, decoupling many of the costs of energy, or field of externalities, from spaces of consumption. The inability for the current global economic system to account for these externalities has created a context of scarcity, increasing sociospatial inequality, cycles of boom and bust and environmental destruction bringing our planet to the brink of collapse. The growing global awareness of climate change and concern for energy security brought about by the 1970 oil shocks caused a shift towards complex systems thinking, territorial metabolism and ecological consciousness. Increasingly physical infrastructures/systems are overlaid and integrated with digital and soft systems generating new datascapes and further mediating our daily experience with energy and nature. Centralization of control of these complex systems has lead to a lack of agency by individuals and communities. The rise of renewables, emerging energy storage capacity, and ICTs make decentralization possible, however social infrastructure and soft systems are barriers to their large scale implementation. In order to recouple sites of consumption to those of production it is imperative to foster digital literacy and territorial awareness of this space of flows and datascapes. In doing so we create the opportunity for value articulation and agency by the collective and the potential for new local energy ecologies to emerge and integrate territorially. This requires us to reconsider the existing interfaces we use to access energy and information which are currently biased towards consumption and circumvent collective experience and action.