Julia Kirch Kirkegaard receives ERC Starting Grant 2023

Julia Kirch Kirkegaard has received 1,475,751 mio. Euro within Science & Technology Studies (STS) for her research project “Good-by-Devicing - Probing how value comes to matter in the energy transition”.

Aim of the project

The climate crisis accentuates the need to decouple societies from using fossil fuels. At the same time, renewable energy projects frequently face resistance, making them difficult to implement. Often, origins of controversies are to be found in decisions already made long before the project planning and development phase, which is why it can be difficult to counter the resistance.

The Good-by-Devicing project seeks to accommodate broader social concerns over the impacts of the energy transition much earlier by inquiring into processes much earlier on. In the design phase, specifically, experts develop and use critical design tools such as energy scenarios, digital simulations, and procurement schemes. There is a tendency to think of energy transition as an expert issue based on techno-economic valuations, and these design tools incorporate expert decisions on what concerns to include and exclude early on in the design of the energy transition.

To illustrate the importance of value in the energy transition, the project uses the case of the contested development of the world's first 'energy island' in Denmark. The natural island of Bornholm is used as a strategic research site to ask how the energy transition could be valued otherwise so that broader social concerns are included. Here the project dares to intervene in the experts’ ’control-room’, through co-production workshops experimenting with how and whether alternative values can be incorporated into the design tools.

By combining perspectives from Science & Technology Studies of Valuation Studies and the Sociology of Expertise, the project will provide a new understanding of local resistance to renewable energy. Furthermore, the project contributes to the Social Acceptance literature, to Valuation Studies – particularly the new notion of ‘the good economy’ - exploring how the 'good fossil-free society' could be re-devised to account for social concerns, potentially reducing conflict.

Read more about Julia Kirch Kirkegaard’s area of research here .

See Julia Kirch Kirkegaard explain the project here .