McISCE Discover Seminar with Rhys Williams

In contrast to the unsustainable and increasingly fragile global, fossil-fuelled, and market-based energy system, an energyshed names a geographic area and governance model in which all power consumed is sustainably resourced and supplied within it, and associated wastes returned to it.

In September 2023 Glasgow’s Infrastructure Humanities Centre ran a series of workshops bringing together and building relationships between multiple academic, public, private, and community stakeholders to think through and perform the capacities of the energyshed as an idea capable of convening diverse interests and perspectives, starting not from technical or economic questions, but rather from questions of desire, value, community, and agency.

This talk describes those workshops, how they were framed and how they went, what ideas came out of them, what the change of starting point allowed, and what the potential of the energyshed might be for achieving a just and sustainable future.