New Power Generation: Using Energy Pasts to Inform Energy Futures

In mid-June 2020, as Britain emerged from the first Covid-19 lockdown, a rare piece of good news circulated: for 67 days, 22hours, and 55 minutes Britain had run entirely on coal-free energy, the longest such stretch since the Industrial Revolution. Low-carbon, renewable sources are powering a transition from fossil fuels to cleaner energy. As nations look for ways to meet commitments to lower carbon emissions, renewable energy grows in significance and scale.

Discussions of renewable energy, then, invoke both future promise and a break from past fossil fuel dependencies. But the histories of wind, wave, tidal, and solar power are longer, and more closely intertwined with existing energy infrastructures and practices than often acknowledged. Drawing on research into renewable energy in the UK, this paper will explore how the contrasting frameworks of Climate History and Anthropocene history offer very different narratives and interpretational modes, with important consequences for public understanding of, and adaptation to, contemporary energy transition. By working with the differing (and sometimes challenging) registers of scale, periodisation and narrative that these frameworks offer, new understandings of the connection between energy pasts and futures can be drawn.