ABSTRACT
Visions of the future have a long history in motivating humanity to create a better tomorrow. Notwithstanding their prominence, little academic work has attempted to engage the topic of visions and fantasies empirically or theoretically in a systematic or comparative manner, or connected them to pressing policy concerns such as low-carbon transitions. To address this gap, this book seeks to examine the visions (and fantasies, frames, discourses, imaginaries, and expectations) associated with six state-of-the-art energy systems—nuclear power, hydrogen fuel cells, shale gas, clean coal, smart meters, and electric vehicles—playing a key role in current deliberations about low-carbon energy supply and use. The book’s methodology is based on extensive original data or analysis including semi-structured interviews, media content analysis, and systematic reviews. The book is motivated by the premise that tackling climate change via low-carbon energy systems (and practices) is one of the most significant challenges of the twenty-first century, and that success will require not only new energy technologies but also new ways of understanding language, visions, and discursive politics. In doing so, the book unveils what the future of energy systems could look like, and how their meanings are produced, often alongside moments of contestation. The discursive creation of the energy systems of tomorrow are often propagated in polity, hoping to be realized as the material fact of the future but processed in conflicting ways, with underlying tensions as to how contemporary societies ought to be ordered and disordered.
