當代綠能的爭議與挑戰

主持人:趙家緯(臺灣永續轉型實踐網絡 研究員)

轉動台灣綠能的積極公民:台灣公民電廠的行動者網絡分析

洪寧均(國立台灣大學氣候變遷與永續發展國際學位學程 碩士生)

本文主旨在於考察公民電廠作為創新利基技術物,如何轉化並納入公民社會進而轉動我國多層次視角的永續性轉型,其中探索不同行動者的能源行動,看見公民電廠與積極公民相互運生並共同形構出的台灣公民電廠樣貌。
本文採用二手文獻與檔案分析、參與觀察和深度訪談等研究方法。並使用行動者網絡理論作為分析架構,跟隨台灣公民電廠發展中的領先積極公民:台灣再生能源推動聯盟、主婦聯盟環境保護基金會、綠主張綠電合作社與陽光伏特家,看見行動者創建公民電廠網絡的過程。其次,本文進一步以陽光伏特家公民電廠網路平台為例,闡述數位轉型的公民電廠如何解構公民參與門檻,進而號召更多能源積極公民。研究結果發現,公民電廠從實體再生能源科技到數位轉型技術物的型態演變,進而使公民參與發生本質性改變,更動員出不同空間的能源積極公民,積極公民樣貌與性別結構也因不同時空下的社會技術結構背景而有不同的演化與轉變。
最後,本研究於理論貢獻中拓展行動者網絡理論對於數位網絡空間及行動者內部能動性的差異進行補充;經驗貢獻則整合公民電廠巨觀視角與微觀行動,提出公民電廠與積極公民相互型塑的關係;政策層面則從由下而上的公民參與力量出發,針對國內能源政策提出建言。

關鍵字:公民電廠、積極公民、行動者網絡理論、能源轉型、公民參與

Energy Transitions Across Time and Space – Sociotechnical Imaginaries of Wind in Denmark and Taiwan

Thomas Harboell Schroeder(KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment, Department of Philosophy and History, PhD student)

Taiwan has in recent years started a massive development of wind energy especially offshore in the Taiwan Strait. Wind energy development in Taiwan is partly enabled by experienced foreign businesses. Much of the technology used in modern wind energy thus transferred to Taiwan and several of the globally leading companies can be traced back to the country of Denmark. Danish companies have played a significant role to establish wind energy in Taiwan. This paper takes a global historical angle to look at the ongoing development of wind energy in Taiwan in relation to the historical development of modern wind energy in Denmark.
The way that wind energy is introduced in Taiwan is vastly different from the way wind energy became successful in Denmark from the 1970s to 1990s. Danish wind energy began at small scale. Although it was effectively made possible by the Danish state, wind energy was largely a bottom-up development, fostered by small and medium-sized businesses. It was often inspired by antiauthoritarian sentiments and carried by ideas of self-supply, reduced consumption and shared design knowledge and skills. Out of those values grew community wind energy, shared and locally owned turbines that played a massive role for the success of wind. Some of those small and medium-sized businesses, however, have since grown into international giants now engaged across the globe including in Taiwan. What they bring is not community wind, but highly advanced technology feeding into a development that is mainly top-down and planned by the state. This change is not only to do with changing values and different cultures, although they play a role. Instead, the material change of wind energy technology means that recent years’ wind interacts vastly differently with the sociotechnical systems it becomes part of. This paper is particularly concerned with the sociotechnical imaginary related to wind energy – how it travels and changes across time and space, and how such change is related to the flow and constant evolution of wind energy technology.

關鍵字:wind energy, sociotechnical imaginaries, flow of technology, energy transition

Renewable Ruses: Bioenergy Development in North Carolina’s Coastal Plains

Dana E. Powell(Appalachian State University, Anthropology, Associate Professor)

The humid, lowland swamps of eastern North Carolina are rich in biological and cultural diversity and yet threatened by agro-extractive industries. For centuries, these marshes have offered refuge for wetlands wildlife as well as for descendent communities of enslaved Africans and the region’s original Indigenous inhabitants. At the same time, since the 1980’s, this landscape has become home to more pigs than humans. Tightly confined in large-scale feeding operations (CAFOs) for industrial pork production (owned by the Hong Kong based corporation, WG Group), swine support a pork-centered economy that contaminates air and water. And in 2020, CAFOs became hot spots for the infectious spread of COVID-19. This same territory is also overlaid with multiple hazardous energy industries and periodically impacted by intensive east coast hurricanes, whose floodwaters move toxic wastes out of CAFOs and inland along the waterways, with each major storm.
In this matrix of socio-ecological risk, Indigenous and African-American environmental defenders draw upon counter-knowledges from their respective subaltern epistemologies as they collaborate to combat the further entrenchment of air and water pollution, and erosion of sovereignty, in their region. Yet this time around, the projects do not at first glance look like “late industrialism” (Fortun 2012), though they yet may be; rather, they are presented, by their state-actor spokespersons as “renewable energy.” Indeed, these newest threats arise from the technological layering of so-called “green” technologies on top of existing extractive infrastructures, as: (1) the ongoing biomass industry, in the form of deforestation for wood pellet fuel; and (2) proposed biogas, via methane capture from CAFO hog operations.
This paper examines localized responses to these “green” threats and how situated, Indigenous and Black epistemologies intertwine with Western science, to form new forms of knowledge infrastructure, including efforts to rethink and redesign “resiliency.” Environmental defenders embrace and resist the idea of resiliency, as it trends among funders, state actors, and social movements themselves, seeking to understand how the co-production of knowledge that draws from subaltern traditions might reshape notions of “preparedness,” “bounce-back,” and “survival.” A groundswell of opposition to wood pellet biomass and swine CAFO biogas has formed among the pluricultural residents of the region, particularly in the face of intensified hurricanes. While biogas and biomass might appear to offer a “sustainability” solution to the co-displacement of humans and swine by hurricanes, through building the local economy, critics of biogas argues this is merely a technological veil for longstanding environmental injustices in the region. Contributing to discussions in STS about the role of technology and contamination in generating new knowledge infrastructures, this paper examines how the rising tides of the Atlantic Ocean are transforming human-environment interactions among community-based leaders as they collaborate to localize resiliency in a manner that disrupts the agro-industrial landscape.

關鍵字:renewable energy, hurricanes, Indigenous epistemology, biomass, biogas, knowledge infrastructure, environmental justice

低碳能源轉型下的消費者脆弱度分析:以英國電力零售市場為例

呂依庭(國立臺灣大學氣候變遷與永續發展國際碩士學位學程 碩士生)、林子倫(國立臺灣大學政治學系 副教授)

隨著氣候變遷議題持續發酵,世界各國積極關注減緩及調適措施並採取減碳行動。 其中,再生能源作為減少碳排放的重要選項,在許多國家開展低碳能源轉型下,電力部 門的綠能發電之占比逐年攀升,逐漸走向電力市場去碳化(decarbonization)。在電業發 展情境中,自 20 世紀末電業展開自由化與去管制化,促成電力零售(retail)競爭市場 的出現;而近期的去碳化、去中心化與數位化更將電力市場帶向新的形態。然而,自市 場開放競爭以降,有一群電力的「脆弱消費者」,在迎向新一波的轉型時,不僅強化既有 損害、更為其帶來新的風險。因此,如何辨別處於脆弱情境的消費者,並協助他們減少 因電力系統轉變而帶來的衝擊,成為低碳轉型進程中需特別著重之處。本研究將以英國 為例,透過文獻分析方法進行英國電力零售市場的案例研究。分析架構上,本文將從能 源的「分配正義」、「程序正義」和「肯認正義」三面向,闡述英國自電力市場開展低碳 轉型之脈絡下所呈現出的消費者脆弱度(consumer vulnerability)型態與相關挑戰,而如 何從這些能源正義面向中顧及消費者利益,同時亦推進低碳電力市場轉型。近年臺灣政 府積極推動低碳能源轉型暨電業改革,本研究期許透過低碳轉型下的英國電力零售市場 經驗,作為臺灣未來發展之參考借鑒。

關鍵字:低碳轉型、電力零售市場、能源正義、永續發展目標、消費者脆弱度