Scaling Down Power: A Geography of Electricity Prosumption

Technologies for Distributed Generation contribute to the next energy transition by offering ownership of cheap, localized, reliable, low-carbon electricity generation capacity to prosumers- individuals and communities who produce and consume their own electricity. Previous radical changes to systems of energy provision initiated social and political transformation and an energy transition occurring through the decentralization of electricity generation will do no less. This is because the centralized infrastructure for electricity provision has been organized at the national level helping to construct the nation state as a sovereign regime and lending authority to its claim over life and population management (biopower).
Increasing electricity prosumption may therefore bring about a socio-material transformation that weakens the state's exclusive claim to biopower by discontinuing the material structures that have supported the centralization of political authority in its hands, leading to a more decentralized and community-led system. The overarching question for my research is: Does energy prosumption enable communities to participate in biopolitical practice and challenge centralized biopower and if so how?
I will investigate these changes by exploring how prosumption can modify the perception of and behaviour toward centralized biopower. I will undertake qualitative comparative fieldwork studies in Italy, which produces 22.2% of its electricity from DG technologies. The conflict between proponents of government centralization and defenders of regionalism in Italy has recently been centred on the need or otherwise for new large energy infrastructures. The research will inform the search for new models of sustainable energy production and distribution.