Engineering Keywords

Life cycle-analysis 

Life-cycle analysis (LCA) is a research methodology which traces a material, product, or practice through its entire “life-cycle”—from the extraction of raw materials to disposal—to assess its use of resources and its ecological impacts. This process includes an inventory analysis, in which researchers measure the total amount of energy and materials used in the life cycle (Radovanović 78). This data is used to estimate certain environmental impacts of the entire process, such carbon footprint, water use, and land use (Radovanović 79). The study then suggests improvements based on these findings (Radovanović 79).  

Through offering a comprehensive overview of a material from “cradle to grave,” LCA facilitates comparisons between the environmental costs of different materials. This would otherwise be difficult considering the complex nature of each stage of the life cycle (Nemova et al. 2). Importantly, it also allows engineers and policy makers to make informed decisions about which materials to use.  

As Sovacool et al. emphasize, mining for and disposing of materials used in low carbon technologies have many harmful environmental impacts that are often overlooked in the Global North and “displaced, or spatially externalized, to the Global South” (17). 

LCA foregrounds the importance of considering the entire life-cycle in assessing the environmental costs of energy storage technologies and opens up questions about how these impacts are unevenly distributed and felt.

Batteries 

A battery stores energy in chemical bonds and releases it as electrical energy through a series of chemical reactions that enable electrons to flow through a circuit.  

Batteries are made up of an anode, a cathode, and an electrolyte. The anode is a chemical agent located at the negative terminal that loses electrons in an oxidation reaction when the battery is in use. The electrons freed in this reaction flow through the load attached to the battery—the device for which it is supplying electricity—to the cathode at the positive terminal. The cathode is a chemical agent that gains these electrons in a reduction reaction. The electrolyte separates the anode and cathode, preventing the battery from short-circuiting. It allows cations and anions (molecules that have lost or gained one or more  electrons, respectively) to pass between the cathode and anode, completing the circuit (Brodd 254).  

A secondary cell refers to a battery which can be recharged by passing electricity in the opposite direction, whereas primary batteries are discharged after use (Brodd 254). When the flow of electricity runs in the opposite direction in a secondary cell, the chemical reactions are reversed such that the reactants are regenerated from the products (Brodd 256).  

As the chemical components supplying the flow of electrons through the battery, the anode and cathode are crucial parts of the device. The chemical makeup of these elements impact many important features of a battery, including voltage, energy efficiency, energy density, and the cycle life of a secondary cell—“the number of times the battery can be completely discharged and recharged to its original capacity” (Brodd 256). The chemical compositions of the anode and cathode are therefore fundamental elements of a battery’s design which bear heavily on its functionality. 

Energy density & energy efficiency 

Energy density is a measure of how much energy something can store in relation to either its mass or volume (it can be measured by either), while energy efficiency measures the energy put into something against the energy produced by it. Energy density is typically measured in watt-hours by kilogram (Wh/kg) or by litre (Wh/L), and energy efficiency is typically measured by percentage.

Improving energy density has focused on the anode and cathode—other parts of the battery cannot be significantly improved upon (Choi & Aurbach 1). “Because the energy density of a rechargeable battery is determined mainly by the specific capacities and operating voltages of the anode and the cathode,” Choi and Aurbach write, research has centered upon the chemical composition of these components (1). The chemical properties of different materials shape their energy density—Pure solid metals are most densely packed with metal atoms and therefore yield the highest energy density, so these are the materials used to make anodes and cathodes (Borah et al. 8).  

Having a high energy density is important for batteries because it’s advantageous for them to be small and light. It is especially important for mobile batteries, where concerns about the weight and space the battery takes up may be especially salient (Borah et al. 2). High energy efficiency is desirable in batteries because it means that less energy is wasted in the process of storing energy (Borah et al. 2). Energy density and energy efficiency can be understood as crucial criteria in creating an effective battery that limits the amount of energy wasted in the process of storage. 

Social Sciences Keywords

Energy justice

Energy justice is both an abstract concept and analytical frame that can be used to raise questions about the equity and justice behind the energy-life cycle, including access to energy services and their environmental and social consequences (Sovacool & Dworkin 436; Fuller & McCauley 1). The term is also a tool to imagine alternative, more just, energy systems (Elmallah et al. 10).

Scholars have defined energy justice using a combination of five different principles that each underscore a different dimension of justice. Firstly, distributive justice interrogates how access to and the costs of energy are unevenly spread (McCauley et al. 917). Recognitional justice holds that attention is due to the larger context in which injustice takes place—Abram et al. argue this means acknowledging that injustices are “conditioned by inter-scalar, socio-economic interactions that are often deeply embedded in global structures, [...] and tend to systematically disadvantage particular groups” (Abram et al. 1038). Procedural justice is based on the need for democratic and fair decision-making processes (McCauley et al. 917). Restorative justice centers the need to account for past injustices and their legacies, which contribute to ongoing unequal power relations (Abram et al. 1039). Lastly, cosmopolitan justice emphasizes the idea that each principle of justice must be applied globally, not just within the borders of individual states (McCauley et al. 917).

However, there are also critiques of a framework of justice based on these principles. Some scholars object to the way this understanding of energy justice is often coupled with assumptions that so-called modernized energy systems and policy-based solutions are universally desired and beneficial (Tornel 48). As Carlos Tornel argues, this understanding of energy justice is also predicated on Western worldviews and understandings of justice (47). For Tornel, energy justice must enact a whole-systems approach while “disconnecting energy justice from the universalized/Western conception of justice and enabling other forms of emancipatory energy projects to emerge” (58). A whole-systems approach broadly means looking across stages of the life cycle of energy, and across technical and social systems when thinking about justice and the causes of injustice (Jenkins et al. 179).

These accounts suggest that approaches to just forms of energy storage must recognize the multidimensional nature of justice, and attend to the ways that one understanding of justice cannot and should not be applied to all contexts.

Energy poverty 

Energy poverty names situations in which a household lacks access to sufficient energy due to a lack of energy infrastructure, an inability to afford electricity, or a combination of these factors.  

Stefan Bouzarovski and Saska Petrova propose that a deprivation of energy services is crucial in defining energy poverty. They argue scholarship has shifted from a focus on fuel and energy itself towards a focus on people’s desire for energy services such as lighting, heating, and cooking (34). By centering energy services, these perspectives suggest that energy needs must be understood as more than a household’s “basic needs.” Instead, energy needs refer to the energy “require[d] for the full participation in society within different geographical and cultural settings” (34).  

Energy vulnerability is another term designed to capture the complex ways that energy poverty can manifest. Energy vulnerability thinking explores the conditions that make a household more or less likely to experience energy deprivation—this line of thinking understands that some households may face energy poverty in certain circumstances, but not constantly (Bouzarovski & Petrova 35). Approaches that foreground energy services and energy vulnerability “allow for a more explicit focus on the geographic aspects of domestic energy deprivation, as dimensions such as energy access, flexibility, efficiency and needs are unevenly distributed across space” (Bouzarovski & Petrova 37).  

These conceptualizations of energy poverty suggest that technical solutions in energy storage must be accompanied by a focus on the social conditions in which these solutions are attempted, and the different roles that energy plays in people’s lives. 

Transition/transformation 

Transition refers to a change in key sectors of society such as energy, agriculture, and education that alters policies, regulations, technical arrangements, and practices, as well as social relations and attitudes. The term “socio-technical system” attempts to capture the way these multidimensional arrangements include human actors and communities, as well as technologies and infrastructures (Nesari et al. 2). 

Writing on socio-technical systems changes, Frank Geels and René Kemp distinguish between transformations and transitions. The former refers to a system change that leads to a change in the direction of the “innovative activities,” but leaves intact the actors who have authority over the prevailing system (445). The latter names a change where there is a new trajectory of action and the emergence of an entirely new system. Geels and Kemp offer the change from “transport system based on horse-drawn carriages to a transport system based on automobiles” as one example of a transition (446).  

Just Transition scholars foreground that efforts to decarbonize present opportunities to address social justice at both local and global scales (Abrams et al. 1034). Simone Abrams et al. argue in favour of a “whole-systems approach” to Just Transition, which frames transitions as “co-evolutionary, dynamic, and non-linear processes that entail distinct but interdependent developments unfolding across different functional and scalar systems” (1037). Furthermore, a whole-systems approach highlights the way that the interaction between different socio-technical systems can be another site of injustice (1037).  

These understandings of transition suggest that energy storage systems are made up of both people and technical elements, and therefore they are both a site to address (in)justice and a site of technological innovation.  

Media Studies Keywords

Communication/transportation 

Communication is often understood as the movement of symbolic content while transportation entails the movement of physical content, yet some scholars argue that these concepts need not be seen as distinct.  

Communication and transportation were not always viewed as separate—John Durham Peters notes that in the United States during the nineteenth century, railroads were referred to as “steam communication” (Speaking Into The Air 7). This historical example points towards a way of understanding communication beyond the circulation of symbolic meaning. Jonathan Sterne affirms that communication is “a means by which social reality is symbolically constructed” and also “built and organized” in a physical sense (118). The conceptual division between communication and transportation in media studies has larger implications on social relations. This separation “bolsters the theoretical privilege of the symbolic over the non-symbolic dimensions of communication” (Sterne 131). It obscures the labour, resources, and other nonhuman factors that shape society and instead presents media as immaterial (Sterne 131).  

Communications and transportation can also be understood as entangled because of the crucial role of media in creating and sustaining transportation infrastructures. Writing on the creation of new pipelines, Darin Barney notes that scientific studies and data collection, state-run public relations campaigns, and protests make up some of the media that “together make up a network of which the pipeline-to-come forms the trunk” (268). It is through these networks of media coordinating the movements of physical goods that transportation is made possible. 

Recognizing communication as transportation allows for energy storage technologies and infrastructures to be understood as media, and for media to be understood as ways of arranging society and exercising power.  

Elemental media 

Elemental media explores the connections between natural elements and media, including the natural elements that make up media technologies, the way that elements themselves can act as media, and the environmental relations these arrangements entail. 

Some scholars, such as Jussi Parikka, have studied minerals used in media technologies. As Parikka argues, the Anthropocene itself as a time period is understood in chemical terms—as “the layers of photosynthesis that gradually were being used for heating and then as energy sources for manufacture in the form of fossil fuels” (17). Social and economic factors that lead to the rise of fossil capitalism therefore cannot be separated from chemistry and from the elements (18).  

Elemental media opens up more expansive understandings of the environment and media. For example, many scholars working in this area view the distinction between natural and human-created as blurry. John Durham Peters has proposed that elements such as water or fire are themselves media. According to Peters, media not only carry content but also support the existence of other things: “[m]edia are our infrastructures of being, the habitats and materials through which we act and are” (Marvelous Clouds 15). Mél Hogan has suggested that “[f]rom an elemental perspective, for example, the internet is not merely an array of computers and cables controlled by companies, but a phenomenon composed through water and water’s regulation” (Starosielski). In this way, the media and elements are deeply intertwined to the point of being impossible to distinguish (Starosielski). 

Thinking about energy storage from an elemental perspective encourages ways of seeing the chemical makeup and material properties of energy storage technologies as mediating our environmental and social relations. 

Logistics 

Logistics both refers to the technical management of supply chains to produce and circulate goods globally and to a way of organizing social life, including environmental relations. As an organizer of both materials and social life in this way, logistics is “a process of transformation that seeks to lubricate, flatten, connect, and smooth out the irregularities of capitalist operations across space and time” (Chua 1443). 

The study of logistical media highlights that media and logistics depend on one another—media technologies, and infrastructures, cannot be described without logistics, and media shape the coordination of logistics (Hockenberry et al. 2). Some scholars argue for an expanded view of logistical media which recognizes that media possess logistical dimensions more broadly, beyond those directly involved in organizing the flow of materials and labour of corporations (Hockenberry et al. 3). Matthew Hockenberry et al. write that “[d]ue to their ability to organize storage and transmission, and their capacity to locate, arrange, and distribute, all media”—from clocks to stamps—“possess this logistical dimension” (3).  

Yet as Charmaine Chua notes, the history of logistics is intertwined with those of imperialism and war—what is now understood as logistics was first used to manage the movement of troops and supplies in the Napoleonic Wars (1444). Because of “the ways in which they have been instrumentalized in histories of militarism, commerce, and empire,” media used in these logistical ways “necessarily advance the trajectories of capitalism, settler colonialism, and biopolitical management” (Hockenberry et al. 4). 

Logistical media suggests that attention is due to how the operations of energy storage technologies and infrastructures are implicated in capitalist and colonial projects and their environmental outcomes. 

Time-bias/space-bias 

Harold Innis’s concepts of time-bias and space-bias understand a medium as not only a technical object or practice, but as a way of organizing societies temporally, spatially and culturally. Innis distinguished between time-biased media which are durable throughout long time scales—such as clay tablets—and space-biased media, which are lightweight and easily transported—such as pamphlets. The physical properties of these types of media lent to different degrees of centralization; “Materials that emphasize time favour decentralization and hierarchical types of Institutions,” Innis writes, “while those that emphasize space favour centralization and systems of government less hierarchical in character” (qtd. in Comor 12). In Innis’s view, a balance of both types of biases is crucial for a society to thrive, as the tendency of time-biased media towards decentralization and the tendency of space-biased media will counteract one another (Comor 10).  

Time-bias and space-bias are also associated with different monopolies of knowledge. These monopolies arise when institutions take control of a given medium, “control[ling] both information (involving its production, dissemination and access to media) and how information is processed or interpreted into what is known” (Comor 12). Innis developed the concept of bias as a “heuristic tool” to promote greater self-reflection within scholarship about media, which he believed would counterbalance these monopolies (Comor 11). 

The concepts of time-bias and space-bias suggest that the material properties of energy storage technologies have larger impacts on social arrangements through how they organize temporal and spatial experience in ways that bear on energy justice.

Energy Humanities Keywords

Petroculture 

Petroculture refers to the way that fossil fuels are not only the dominant source of energy in contemporary society, but are also deeply entrenched in political and social life.  

Matthew Huber argues that the American petroleum industry in the 1970s was tied to a particular neoliberal suburban lifestyle predicated on personal choice. “Petroleum both powered and provisioned a particular lived geography …  that allows for an appearance of privatized command over space and life - or petro-privatism,” Huber writes (306). This neoliberal lifestyle demanded that individuals run their homes with the same “entrepreneurial logic” and dependence on fossil fuels that was commonplace to commercial businesses (306). 

Achieving decarbonization does not equal dismantling that petroculture. Today, homeowners can store electricity generated by their personal solar panels using behind-the-meter using cobalt-free batteries (White-Nockleby 697). The “private control and detachability” afforded by these batteries means that users can isolate themselves, “maintaining a comfortable environment in the face of disruptions, even intimately proximate ones” (697). White-Nockleby notes that these efforts enable individuals to further atomize themselves rather than take up collective efforts to mitigate climate change (702). 

The term petroculture suggests that attention is due to the complex ways energy and its storage shape “our values, practices, habits, beliefs, and feelings” (Petrocultures Research Group 9). A just energy transition therefore demands both dismantling physical infrastructures and ways of living tied to fossil fuel use.  

Ecomodernism 

Ecomodernism is a political ideology that claims that technological innovation and market capitalism can allow humans to thrive while mitigating climate change. Proponents of ecomodernism argue that technological innovation—such as carbon sequestration—will make human societies drastically more efficient and will allow humans to also prosper beyond the current estimations for planetary limits (Eckersley 987). Therefore, devoting attention to developing these technologies will lead to fewer negative environmental impacts while stimulating economic growth (987). Ecomodernists believe that in this way, economic growth can be decoupled from environmental harm (987). 

One way to approach criticism of ecomodernism is through the term sustainability. As Leerom Medovoi writes, sustainability has come to mean a particular neoliberal “governmental” logic in which capitalism must be sustained while climate change and resource depletion threaten to constrain it (343). In this perspective, sustainability means that the worth of an environment and of human social life is equal only to “their convertibility into the abstract life of the economy” (344). Achieving social sustainability does not mean actively pursuing justice, but addressing injustices to the extent that populations can sufficiently service the economy (344). 

The Breakthrough Institute is among the organizations championing ecomodernism. When asked how he understands sustainability, the Institute’s founder Ted Nordhaus highlighted that today’s population is living proof of how modern technology can alter natural limits otherwise thought untenable (Whitaker & Dattani). What sustainability means for Nordhaus is that “large populations of humans” can live comfortably and happily (qtd. in Whitaker & Dattani).

“I want to give people living in the future the options, choices, agency, and the ability to make those decisions on their own terms,” Nordhaus says. “We can do that by building out the knowledge base, technology base, wealth base, and resource base that will make that possible” (qtd. in Whitaker & Dattani).

Criticisms of ecomodernism suggest that economic and social changes must accompany technological innovations in energy storage to achieve a just transition.

Stock / flow 

Stock and flow are concepts that describe two different spatiotemporal profiles, or ways that energy production can relate to time and space. Flow sources of energy are limited to use when and where they are “naturally” available. Stock sources can be stored and transported for use elsewhere, at any time. One example of stock energy is fossil fuels. Andreas Malm writes that these sources seem “to be standing outside of time” because changing weather and seasonal cycles, and even the rise and fall of human civilizations, did not see the end of these sources (Fossil Capital 42). Flow sources continue to exist regardless of whether they are captured by humans and do not require labour to harness, such as wind or running water in a river (Fossil Capital 39). Yet these sources cannot be found anywhere and at any time, as they are part of the natural landscape and its changing conditions (Fossil Capital 39). Stock and flow sources of energy also differ in terms of the forms of labour and mediation required to access and harness them. 

As Malm describes in Fossil Capital, flow sources cannot be controlled and are shared. For example, one person’s use of a flowing river to power a water wheel will not impede a neighbour’s (Fossil Capital 117). However, stock sources can be seized and controlled for the benefit of some at the exclusion of others to create surplus-value (Fossil Capital 288). Because, as a stock source, coal could be transported and used at will without interruption, it “was congenial to the abstract time of capitalist property relations” in ways that flowing water was not (“The Origins of Fossil Capital” 56). Abstract time refers to the fact that under capitalism, labour needs to be “utterly malleable to the temporal needs of capital,” and therefore time itself becomes independent from natural time (“The Origins of Fossil Capital” 56). Malm ultimately argues that a transition from stock to flow is needed to mitigate climate change and dismantle the fossil economy (Fossil Capital 367). 

The concepts of stock and flow opens up questions as to how the physical properties of different energy sources are linked to how society is organized and to the potential for just energy systems and relations. 

Intermittency 

Intermittency refers both to the sporadic electricity supply from renewable energy sources and to a relationship to electricity accepting of this unsteady energy flow.  

Karen Pinkus draws connections between intermittency and the rhythms of the factory during Autonomia: a 60s and 70s Italian leftist social movement. Pinkus describes that  during this time, Fordist factory management attempted to ensure a smooth flow of work through controlling the speed of production and “manipulat[ing] paychecks by adding or subtracting piecework” (336). Workers resisted these measures by tying themselves to conveyor belts and playing cards instead of working to disrupt the rhythm of production (336). 

Pinkus concludes that Autonomia opens up news way of relating to power characterized by an intermittent flow of energy, which are “not easily assimilable to the repetitious and exhausting labor of factory work…the regular work hours of the office, or the odd hours of the temp, or to the hyperenergized flows of international capital” (339). Like Pinkus, Joel Auerbach notes that a shift to renewable flow sources alone will not dismantle the deep rooted, societal desire for electricity to always be ready for use (Auerbach 183).  

Intermittency suggests that an energy transition necessitates inhabiting other relationships to electricity beyond desiring for it to be constantly available, and being attentive to the role energy storage plays in sustaining these alternative ways of living. 

Extraction/extractivism  

Extraction describes both the physical processes and the social and environmental relations through which natural resources are removed from the earth and are valued as the means of economic gain for a subset of humans. Extractivism names the larger ideology through which extraction takes place, which Christopher Chagnon et al. have framed as one of many “modalit[ies] of capital accumulation” that entails economic and social relations as well as environmental ones (Szeman & Wenzel 506; Chagnon et al. 763). 

The term has been expanded to describe the extraction of entities beyond natural resources, such as bitcoin and data (Mezzadra & Neilson 194). Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson note that even supply chains have an extractive dimension to it, as these chains take “advantage of specific conditions of labour and social reproduction that are not necessarily of their own making” and control various “heterogenous productive environments” from far away (198). However, Imre Szeman maintains that the term’s strength is in its description of material processes—extraction involves an environmentally damaging process in which something is depleted or used up in a nonreciprocal relationship (445). As Szeman observes, “we do not describe solar or wind energy through the language of extraction, though these forms of energy also produce – i.e. extract – value” (“On the politics of extraction” 445). 

Extractivism suggests that when thinking about energy storage, it's important to not only consider the ecological impacts of materials used, but also how they may perpetuate unequal environmental and social relations. 

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