Solarchy

Etymology: From Latin solar-, relating to or determined by the sun, and the Greek suffix -archy, denoting a type of rule or government
Definition: Rule over and through solar power
Antonym: Solar anarchy

In response to the social and ecological devastation wreaked by fossil cultures, solarities have been proposed as critical utopian politics for just energy transitions.¹ This politics consists of building worlds of solidarity and care in relation to, and energy derived from, the sun. They aim at disrupting the oppressive power relations of carbon colonialism, petrocapitalism, or petropatriarchy. Accordingly, the energopolitical² imagination of solarities is anarchist.

In Lusatia, the political reality of the transition from fossil to solar energy looks very different. Mining companies like LEAG secure their local monopoly and global capital by building large-scale solar farms. New start-ups such as Heliathek develop top-secret, high-tech photovoltaic technology to dominate markets worldwide. Opposed to the anarchist promise, these real-existing solar economies entrench hierarchies and create new forms of domination; they embody archist³ energopolitcs which seek to rule over and through solar power. Defined as such, solarchy adds a conceptual tool for negative critique to the utopian project of solarities. Such critical analysis of solar power relations yields two insights about energy transitions in Lusatia and beyond.

1) Building fences around sunlight

On the one hand, solarchy means ruling over solar power. In Lusatia, this is achieved by capitalizing on unfair advantages such as enclosing and controlling commons. At its core, solar power is simple: besides sunlight only a receiving technology (e.g. photovoltaic panel) as well as space for this receiver are needed. While sunlight in principle is universally and infinitely available, space and receiving technology are not. For instance, LEAG was able to set-up large scale solar farms, because it owns a lot of “low-conflict” real-estate, “a goldmine” as a company official told us. The first picture shows one of these low-conflict areas, an old military airport that LEAG’s legal predecessor appropriate through the underburdened lignite in the GDR. Similarly, Heliathek started as a publicly funded research project at TU Dresden, but then turned into a private company, owned by big corporations. Its lowweight, flexible, and organic photovoltaic technology, HeliaSol®, is protected by patents, the high-levels of expertise required, and last but not least secrecy: company policy prohibits taking pictures of the “magic” machines or even looking at it from up close. Solarchy is exercised by setting material and intellectual fences around the commons necessary for solar energy.

2) Sunshine out of their arse

Solarchy also means rules through solar power for instance by legitimizing domination. Because transitions from fossil to renewable energy are political imperatives, those who drive it or even appear to comply with it gain moral legitimacy. Owning a lot of land not only enables LEAG to build solar parks, but building solar parks also legitimizes that LEAG owns a lot of land. As shown on the second picture, Heliatek markets HeliaSol® not as more efficient (because it is not) but as more ubiquitously applicable than conventional photovoltaic panels. This has made HeliaSol® popular with large companies who can show off sustainability on the facades of their buildings, even though many continue extractive or polluting practices. Here,solarchy is achieved by shading this underburden and making these extractive and polluting companies appear as if sun shines out their arse.

Unshading solar power; anarchizing energy transition

Maybe power and domination cannot be avoided in energy transition; maybe climate urgency requires or even justifies some solarchy. However, taking this as an affirmation of power or domination tout court amounts to saying that climate change mitigation is futile because some climate change is inevitable. If power is inevitable, we would do well not to hide it, but acknowledge and limit it as much as possible. As a critical term solarchy turns the spotlight on power, questions the legitimacy of hierarchies and calls for mitigating domination.

Solarchy critique also sharpens the positive, anarchist vision for solar power and energy transitions. The problems of controlling the commons in Lusatia is the mirror image of the anarchist cultural imagination for example embodied in solarpunk:

“A solarpunk ‘economy of the commons’ would dispense with both profiteering corporations and statist central planning in favour of worker-run cooperatives, collaborative exchange networks, common pool resources, and control of investment by local communities.”⁴

Anarchizing solar energy would mean to decentralize and recommunize the means of their production. Moreover, anarchism contributes to the debate about the cultural imagination around the infinity of the sun. Is infinite energy to be embraced as overcoming scarcity in capitalist economies or to be resisted because it strengthens the imperative of limitless growth and productivity? An anarchist answer is to embrace post-scarcity abundance but resist the imperative to use it.

Finally, instead of a rigid form of political organization or static social theory, anarchism is best understood as an “ethical discourse about revolutionary practice”.⁵ This understanding benefits energy transitions by shifting the attention from future-oriented outcomes to present practice and process; from where we are going (renewable energy), to the question of how are going to get there. The main dialectical purpose of the term solarchy is to provoke creative, anarchic thinking (#Masterplan B) about this tranisitioning rather than succumb to the banal futures of capitalist realism or climate cynicism.

1. After Oil Collective, Solarities, 2022 ↩︎
2. Dominic Boyer, Energopolitics, 2019 ↩︎
3. Urusula Le Guin, The Dispossesed, 1998 ↩︎
4. https://solarpunkanarchists.com/2016/05/27/what-is-solarpunk/ ↩︎
5. David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, 2004 ↩︎