Abstract
This chapter is an attempt to make sense of the nature, modalities, outcomes and possibilities of urban energy transition in Paris. This transition process is examined in the context of a variety of equally meaningful stakes and strategic objectives around decarbonization, municipal control of infrastructure and the continuing role of nuclear power. Each of these concerns emerges through debates and knowledge controversies around the make-up, functioning and use of particular objects or materials including resources, pipes, contracts, reports and radiators. This captures a processual notion of transition as characterized by work and activities at different sites and levels, and as constituted by the effectivity of material circulations, flows and stabilities which reveal and highlight key issues and contentions, become open to claims and appropriations, and defy, resist and remain unruly.
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Notes
- 1.
The title has also been translated more directly as ‘The electricity fairy’, but this does not capture as well, in my view, the sense of a widespread diffusion of a life-sustaining current or phenomena.
- 2.
As one interviewee put it for example: ‘We would like the term “energy transition” to disappear and to be replaced by “climate, air, energy”. At least that would be clear, because in my opinion in two years the energy transition will not be fashionable and everyone will have forgotten what it is’ (City of Paris official interview, May 2013).
- 3.
Local electricity supply is also a separate public service. The City of Paris has, however, attributed a single public service concession for both services (distribution and supply) to ERDF and EDF (as separate but closely linked companies). For the Regional Court of Accounts, this is ‘a source of confusion and opacity’ (Chambre Régionale des Comptes d’Ile-de-France 2010, p. 2).
- 4.
These administrative tribunals have the task of overseeing and verifying the accounts of public authorities and local governments.
- 5.
A 2009 audit identified a level of underinvestment in the Paris network to the tune of between 750 million and 1 billion euros, so it is an ageing infrastructure which has been 60% amortized (compared to a national average of 39%) (Baupin and Gassin 2009).
- 6.
It is only since the end of 2013 that ERDF has been obliged by State Council (Conseil d’Etat), the administrative supreme court, to provide detailed disaggregated technical and financial information about each of the contracts that it runs.
- 7.
Indeed, at this time electricity began to be produced in quantities which vastly surpassed demand: ‘we didn’t know at all who was going to consume it all’ (EDF engineer, quoted in Weiler 2016).
- 8.
In the study, individual electric heating consumed less than 100 KWh/m2/year compared to collective gas or district heating at around 250 KWh/m2/year. The former also produced far less CO2 at 89 kg/inhabitant compared to 665 kg/inhabitant for fuel heating (APUR 2007, summary on p. 48).
- 9.
A Greenpeace study showed that an electricity future based on renewables would provide more value for money than renewing nuclear plants (Greenpeace 2014).
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Rutherford, J. (2020). Active Infrastructures and the Spirit of Energy Transition in Paris. In: Redeploying Urban Infrastructure. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17887-1_4
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