ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on energy transitions, modernity, sustainability and their interactions. It presents some programmatic reflections on how to incorporate the scalar analysis of energy transitions, modernity and sustainability within the social sciences. It explores the outline of an approach that could be called 'a critical geography of energy'. The chapter excavates the origins of the 'geography of energy' and argues that more academic work under this heading is justified, in particular through renewed emphasis on energy, modernity and sustainability. Reflexive modernity, which helps to situate sustainability within this energy-modernity rather than outside of it, stresses that sustainability. The Lao government's goal of pursuing a 90 percent household electrification rate by 2020, as part of its strategy to graduate from it has least-developed country status. The notion of energy-modernity as a dispersed and non-monolithic philosophical condition sheds new light on some of the implicit or explicit conceptualisations of modernity emerging from the literature.
