Keywords

Introduction

During my first period of preparatory fieldwork in summer 2018, I reached out to a renewable energy promotion agency (abbreviated here as REOH) based in Sapporo, the largest city on the Japanese island of Hokkaido, to get a better understanding of the issues of their organisation and their clients and members, many of whom were municipalities and companies in Hokkaido. REOH had its offices in one of the tallest buildings in the city. I was greeted by Miyata, a junior member of the organisation in a conference room outside the main office space. I believed them to be in their early 30s. They laid out documents outlining some of their past projects and outputs of the organisation, speaking in a cordial but rehearsed way. Incidentally, we had both done graduate research in the same former coal-producing area of central Hokkaido.

Our interview began with some very basic questions on REOH. The agency’s main functions were as a go-between, networker and needs-matcher, standing at the intersection of national and prefectural policymakers, municipalities, energy producers and financiers among others, hosting seminars and distributing information to members. The agency hosted frequent events allowing guests, particularly from Germany and Denmark, to speak about the successes of renewable energy development projects. In its mission statement, dated May 2012 and signed by 50 municipalities, it makes direct reference to the need to fundamentally overhaul the country’s energy policy and develop renewable energy resources, pledging to offer support in problem-solving and gathering information and know-how (REOH 2021). The discussion turned to some of the ways Hokkaido could achieve greater independence in its energy development, with Miyata mentioning microgrids, Home Energy Management Systems (HEMS) and Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) as avenues of interest. Having a general idea of what these were, but wanting to know a bit more about how Miyata saw these projects, I asked: ‘Could you tell me, what is a virtual power plant?’.

Miyata, who had so far provided thorough answers, seemed embarrassed to have not prepared a reply to this question. I attempted to reassure them, saying I’m not looking for a definition, and that an answer of their own understanding would be most interesting to me. But already Miyata’s reaction had told me something important: virtual power plants were not the order of the day, despite the emphasis by this promotion agency on drawing from European models. Their answer, while matching my understanding of it as a digital, decentralised supply–demand management system, also lacked examples of where this had been applied or policies to facilitate its implementation. Throughout my fieldwork, I would repeatedly encounter discussions of microgrids and increasing Hokkaido’s energy independence, but there was generally very little discussion of the potential of VPPs or digital technologies outside of mentions of using Internet of Things (IoT) technologies in conceptual presentations by policy actors.

A few months later, in early September 2018, a devastating earthquake would hit south-central Hokkaido, causing damage to the largest coal power plant on the island, which in turn caused an imbalance of supply and demand and a subsequent day-long blackout as a result of the automatic shutdown of the grid. On that cloudless day, I got on my bicycle and I followed the old path of the train lines that used to carry coal from Yubari in the centre of the island down to the ports and thermal power plants in the south-central area of Hokkaido around Tomakomai. I saw convenience stores getting rid of their inventory and long lines of cars waiting at petrol stations, as well as massive solar power plants standing useless due to the protocols for restarting electricity flow first from base load carriers like hydropower then thermal, and only later solar. I visited the site of the coal-fired power plant that was the cause of the blackout, but it was not open to the media, let alone stray anthropologists. Most harrowing was the grim refrain carried by many I spoke to that day: ‘good thing this did not happen in winter…’ Compounding conditions of precarity have made the future uncertain and open to contestation (Allison 2014).

The vulnerabilities made obvious by the Fukushima disaster of 2011, which had somewhat slunk into the background in the years since then, were suddenly foregrounded in this other seismic infrastructural inversion (Bowker 1994). While the 2018 earthquake continues to resonate in Hokkaido’s energy transition, practical advances in digitalisation, VPP, IoT and Artificial Intelligence (AI) remain largely excluded from these discussions, and from the daily practices of many renewable energy advocates and producers. This feeds into a broader and older discourse, in which Japan is seen as constantly lagging behind trajectories set by other wealthy, colonising powers. Within Japan, the former colonial frontier of Hokkaido is among the least developed prefectures (Mason 2012). National policies hitherto focused on promoting high-tech solutions that favour Japanese industries and on increasing the energy mix and strengthening the connections of the grid. They have more recently tried to incorporate the concerns of those who are more concerned with solar extractivism, heat use and local independence. However, as I will explore in this chapter, the divergence between these different energy futures and prioritisation of digital technologies remains materially unresolved in a way that provides a corollary to digitisation enabling sustainability as a matter of course, a point that also figures in other spheres of digitisation (see for example DeAngelo in this book).

Currently, we are living through a diverging expansion of digitalisation in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Several fascinating and concurrent trends are emerging from this accelerated change. Energy-hungry cryptocurrencies have become all the rage (again), as has talk of their environmental impacts and the impacts of digitalisation more broadly (Lange et al. 2020). While demand for fuels for travel has in many places experienced a substantial downturn, the decoupling effect of emissions relative to economic activity from the shift to telework and dearth of travel has not materialised. Indeed, it has barely put a dent in global emissions, emphasising how little impact lifestyle changes have on the overall trend (Tollefson 2021). For all that internet and digital technologies can do to decentralise access and power (see also the introduction of this book), the underlying inequalities are so massive that they are unlikely to effect a reversal on their own, however small.

In light of these multiple effects of digitisation, the cultural evolutionist argument that Japan is simply lagging behind in digitising its society is not the focus here, although it is difficult to avoid mentioning this line of thinking as the government itself aims for a Society 5.0 (modelled after the European model of Industry 4.0) (Cabinet Office 2021) that increasingly blends the virtual and physical (Abram et al. 2019). The contrast in developments on energy and digital technology between Europe and Japan remains interesting to consider more laterally, allowing Hokkaido’s particular renewable energy projects to speak back not only to European examples but also to the Japanese government’s relationship to them and to European expertise.Footnote 1 Whereas in many parts of Europe, smart technologies already play a significant role in a much more interconnected electricity grid, the material conditions of the Japanese electricity grid, especially in insular Hokkaido, have created diverging responses to the European models that promote local energy independence.

In this way, European models of renewable energy development and digitisation are adapted and resisted in a seismically shaken Hokkaido, making use of digital technologies to imagine more resilient modes of energy production and use while remaining sceptical of the promise of broad interconnection of Society 5.0. For better understanding of this adaptation and resistance, I introduce the situations surrounding digital technologies and energy generally in Japan, using points of comparison from Europe, showing how the digitisation of electricity grids consists in building yet another nesting abstraction built upon grid infrastructure and energy markets. Whereas digitisation has partially advanced in tandem with the growth of renewable energy, local energy independence movements, and cross-border interconnection in Europe, Hokkaido presents a corollary to the Japanese government’s future designs for Society 5.0. On paper, its approach to digitisation overlaps with the imagination of biogas producers and activists in Hokkaido promoting local leadership in energy infrastructure, but has diverged from this alignment in practice, as the future built into the grid becomes unsettled and contested through multiple disasters. Whereas biogas producers may use sensors, collect heat data and benefit from German technologies, the goal of their heat-centric arrangement remains local independence, and their means of producing energy relies as much on multispecies relationships as digital interfaces. I argue that this represents a contrasting energy future to those put out by European models of local ownership within increased connectivity, and even from the Japanese government’s adapted version of it, because Hokkaido’s recent instability and historical underdevelopment have led biogas producers to seek local independence as a means of moving away from the electrification and digitalisation of a grid they no longer quite trust. I end with some considerations on models as tools for speculative engagement with energy futures that can bring us closer to the materiality of energy and limit the excesses of abstraction of present-day electricity systems.

IoT Society, Energy Blockchain and Promises

Some discussion of the state of digitisation and energy in Japan and Europe is necessary here, as is some elaboration on the relationship between digitisation and energy from social science literature. Though many technologies that would more granularly combine energy management with digital systems beyond markets remain in initial stages of implementation, there remains much to be said about the discussions and a lack thereof.

Another short field note will help illustrate the relationship between digitisation and energy. Ishidani, who worked for four years in a company that made and runs plastic waste-powered and solar-powered plants in Japan, told me that digital technologies and other advances were always paid lip service, but not given the incentives that renewable power production was:

A person at the local economic development office who supported me in my earlier career introduced me to people at the company. My job mainly consisted of managing finances and serving as a liaison between the main company and the solar subsidiary. On my own time I would attend seminars and expand my knowledge of the industry on my own. I also had opportunities to meet with policymakers to discuss how to make regulations more effective from our perspective.

I then asked Ishidani if his conversations with policymakers or within the company included digital technologies and VPPs, and what these discussions were like. Ishidani answered:

VPPs were not really discussed. On my own I learned about the megawatt markets abroad, and other examples of this kind of demand-supply balancing technologies. My sense was that these would take a long time to move markets. People researching these topics had clearly developed real technologies that would have effects if implemented, but there was still a significant gap. From management, and government, those [mentions of VPPs and two-way management technology] were often just performative calls (kakegoe) for them.

Government documents support this narrative. The fundamental technology that would enable VPPs and other data-energy management digitisation and potential decentralisation remains a long way from being implemented across the country. A presentation given to the Ministry of Energy, Transportation and Industry (METI) in 2020 notes how Japan has yet to mandate the implementation of smart meters and has yet to achieve a substantial percentage of use in households compared to many other developed countries (Mitsubishi Research Institute 2021).

Professor of Engineering at Tokyo University, Kashiwagi Takao (2021) notes how the Hokkaido earthquake has put into renewed focus, how an ‘Internet of Energy’ society can create increased resilience to disasters by cutting off demand from a malfunction in a large power plant at the point of connection, switching users to surplus energy supplies at home or from other areas. In an illustration of this society, many technologies that have yet to achieve widespread use are shown as interconnected, separate but with some overlapping roles. Yamamoto Shuichiro (2020), a member of the digital transformation (DX) study group of METI who participated in the preparation of the Ministry’s 2018 report, notes increased attention being paid to DX in Japan since the publication of the report.

However, the Germany Japan Energy Transition Council (2019) has commented that Japan lags behind Germany in its implementation of VPP and Variable Renewable Energy technology. Japan has gradually implemented laws separating production, transmission and supply of energy since the 2011 triple disaster in a move to emulate laws in Germany (among other countries), but technologies like VPPs have yet to make real inroads as renewable energy subsidies discourage VPPs that also aim at trading energy on the market.

The way a VPP works in Germany is that it will use forecasts to schedule production from biogas plants and other decentralised production devices, and through bundling the production units participate in energy trading. Suppliers will buy the energy and ideally, the market will bring together demand and supply and optimise revenue. A Transmission System Operator (TSO) will settle remaining imbalances between groups using reserves (usually coal and gas) based on a universal balancing price for all TSO areas in Germany. In this sense, the reserve, the creation of new capacity and the management of existing capacity are all relatively separate in function. To optimise functioning and revenue, VPPs require not only climate data, but enough metering data on consumption to allow for optimisation and trading back and forth, meaning the widespread use of smart meters at lower scales than energy demand from industries.

The German government attempted widespread implementation of smart meters in 2019, but resistance loomed large and an effective roll out was not achieved. De Dutta and Prasad (2020) talk about the benefits of a society that organises energy and data along the blockchain, creating energy prosumers who sell their energy back to a blockchain-regulated grid. The 2050 climate goals are often cited in literature supporting increased connections and expanded energy markets between European countries through such technologies (Egerer et al. 2016; Fürsch et al. 2013), albeit they are still in their infancy.

Interest in these technologies and models is growing in Japan, too. Companies like Tokyo-based Enechange, which had its initial public offering earlier this year, are situating themselves as the vanguard of an information revolution, with innovations in AI, deregulation of energy markets and decarbonisation going hand in hand. Through their Smart Meter Analysis Platform, they offer a range of data-related services for clients, including energy optimisation, recommendations for gaining clients, facilitating provider switches and energy market information services including analysis reports of weather and news items (Enechange 2021).

Much of this sounds like the same kind of promises made at the time of the dot com bubble and genomics boom (Fortun 2008), but this time, figures in this line of speculation say, it is backed by the compounding technologies and cost reductions needed: there are smart meters, there are competent AI, devices can speak to each other almost seamlessly. Investors in Enechange, as well as companies like Tesla, speculate them to be ready.

Speculation is not just hope for the future, it has materiality (Horst and Miller 2012). Smart meters, data centres, low commodity costs, global supply chains, virtual management systems, IoT consumer devices, advanced market dynamics all come together to create a new digital materiality with new subjects (Gramazio & Kohler 2008; Pink et al. 2016). In this reality, abstraction and speculation from money markets and the digital would inflect the materiality of energy (Horst & Miller 2012, p. 5), similar to effects observed with the viral growth of cryptocurrency.

The history of the markets and digital technologies can be said to be intimately tied to that of energy’s own exponential growth. This is a claim that can be found throughout the history of the energy humanities. Vaclav Smil (1994), drawing on Wilhelm Ostwald (1909) and Leslie White (1943), claims energy is the only universal currency, a means of abstracting and calculating all forms of activity. In this scheme, the evolution of civilisation follows organismic evolution in seeking greater and greater dependence on higher energy flows. There is ample reason to reject evolutionary classifications of bounded civilisations, but we can notice in these works an early recognition of society’s connection with abstracted, de-materialised energy.

The materiality of this energy, the infrastructure, markets and labour required to produce it and move it have acted as barriers and accelerators. This is well-illustrated in Mitchell’s (2009) discussion of fossil fuels being formative to democracy, wherein the move from a materiality of energy based on mines, coal, trains and heat to one based on oil, autonomous systems and electricity, reduced the participation of unionised labour in favour of concentrated power and capital. In Japan, coal-producing areas like Yubari in Hokkaido are examples of this shift as well, with the decline of coal mining from the 1950s to the 1980s coinciding with high economic growth. This ended with a market bubble and crash that caused a long period of economic decline and austerity (Kimura et al. 1996, p. 238; Mochida 2008). These historical and material antecedents have contributed to a wariness of investment in growing the island’s internal infrastructure (digital and otherwise) amid rural depopulation and economic stagnation, leaving Hokkaido’s grid weak to seismic disruptions as seen in 2018.

Contesting Energy Futures in Hokkaido

Hokkaido could now be said to be at a turning point in the digital materiality of its electricity grid. The earthquake showed how a very simple automated shutdown was effective, but also caused by a failure of the grid as such, a recall of Fukushima. Here, I try to situate discussions of transition between the Japanese government and local actors to argue that European models and technologies of renewable energy development are not translating only into a more integrated and digitised system, but also devolving into local, parallel infrastructures. Various actors in Hokkaido are adapting European knowledge while also pushing back on and using the government’s own adaptations, and draw on these to speculate about a disaster-ready future.

In a presentation on its comprehensive vision of a decarbonising Society 5.0 in May 2019, the Ministry of the Environment emphasises municipalities resilient to disasters, distributed and independent energy production and consumption, while also noting the contribution of IoT to innovation in energy and design. A scheme shows rivers, villages, the sea and forests in the centre, but the vast majority of the chart is covered with areas of economic activity and policy ideas that stretch out and overwhelm the place in this vision of Society 5.0. The name of this scheme, Chiiki Junkan Kyosei-Ken, is translated by the Ministry as the ‘Circulating and Ecological Economy’ but might perhaps be better translated as the Regional Circulation Co-Existence Sphere. In this deliberate move to combine physical and virtual space for a human-centric next generation of society, it is envisioned that we will leave behind the constraints of hard labour, hidden information and other social problems that still affect us in our 4.0 information society (Cabinet Office 2021).

Furthermore, in this scheme, AI, technological efficiencies and more renewable energy will make life easier. But there is little in this society’s scheme that is there to ensure that efficiencies are passed on to workers and eliminate poverty, or to provide basic services that ensure people are cared for in an emergency. Indeed, if the experience of digitisation in Japan during the pandemic now provides any hints, it suggests that when these changes take place, popular concerns of justice will fall by the wayside in favour of political priorities in tech industry development. What is more, the well-being of ecologies might be limited to reducing emissions and human enjoyment of a non-specific nature.Footnote 2 The material reality of energy, its history and its sources remain abstracted in the scheme, even though the specificity of each region’s potential is cited.

From conversations with activists and renewable energy producers before and after this presentation, I learned that the aspect of the plan that was most well-received was the chisan chishou (local production, local use) ideal: understood as investing in region-specific forms of energy and resources to promote independence and resilience. This is where European, and in particular German models of Stadtwerke, public utility companies, were often used by the government as examples of local flows and use preventing capital outflows. Taking the town of Osnabrück in Germany as their main example in their presentation, the Ministry’s representative emphasised how local use and local production had helped subsidise public services, as well as keeping expenses low and creating more jobs. Interestingly, the grassroots activism for (re)municipalisation and energy independence that define Stadtwerke were kept out of their presentation of the model (Hall et al. 2012).

At discussions and panels with energy experts from Europe and Japanese municipalities or businesses who had sent teams to Germany and Denmark, the idea of local independence through local ownership was more clearly emphasised in their statement of model cases. One presentation by a mid-sized city in central Hokkaido in August 2019 cited the city of Freiburg’s urban planning and ownership of energy production, Jühnde as a municipality being completely self-sufficient in energy production, and that 46% of Germany’s renewable energy is owned by individuals and farmers—all examples for taking control of one’s own energy future that could be adopted even in relatively under-funded municipalities in rural Japan.

Similarly, at a panel on fourth generation shared heating systems in October 2019 in Sapporo, hosted by REOH, Japan’s relative lack of district heating was compared to Denmark’s systems to maximise heat efficiency through co-generation, heated water circulation and improved insulation. Yet again, a kind of evolutionary framework is implied here, this time by a mix of Japanese experts, community members and activists, but also with the purpose of emphasising the particular challenges faced with heat in Hokkaido, and the way the country’s feed-in-tariff did little to promote something as basic but extremely effective as improved insulation. The Ministry’s follow-up policy, the feed-in-premium, has addressed some of these criticisms by making a new category of subsidies available for local biogas, biomass and heat use projects. In subsequent meetings organised by REOH in October 2020 and March 2021, centred on local use of biogas and the creation of greenhouses with IoT technology to control the temperature, the idea that a disaster could occur in Hokkaido in winter—making heat a matter of life and death—was repeated alongside hopes that this new generation of policy could be used to do more to meet local needs.

There is a qualitative difference in the way energy structures relationships in the aforementioned examples. With the Stadtwerke model, the Japanese government has taken to emphasise local responsibility for preventing outward expenditure on fossil fuels. Though the government has provided support for renewable energy projects in Hokkaido, the extent to which it is willing to invest in disaster-ready infrastructure and local ownership of energy along the lines of Stadtwerke remains in question in Hokkaido. As an example of disaster readiness, the Ministry of Environment’s presentation mentioned solar panels used in a school and evacuation site in Atsuma in southern Hokkaido during the 2018 earthquake. Ironically, as I mentioned in the beginning of this paper, large solar power plants surrounding Atsuma connected to the grid were effectively made useless by grid protocols that required base load forms of energy to come online first. Many biogas producers I spoke to were of the opinion that if the government was serious about disaster prevention, it should be investing in it more seriously, as the earthquake had made clear people in Hokkaido could no longer count on the grid to always sustain them. In an emergency, they could be on their own.

Similarly, in an interview with city hall officials in a biogas producing area of central Hokkaido, I was told that the central government had denied funding for their effort to build an emergency-use microgrid they had proposed the year after the earthquake, citing cost-effectiveness (despite the Ministry of Environment posting a much upgraded budget for decarbonising and security projects). When I mentioned this on separate occasions to a farmer and a professor I know, their responses were similar: the government was more interested in increasing Hokkaido’s connection and dependency on the mainland and their grid as disaster prevention rather than investing in Hokkaido’s capacity for local use, contrary to the principle of ‘local production, local use’. However, despite being denied the implementation of a Freiburg-like local energy ownership energy model, many rural inhabitants’ desire for more local energy independence has not necessarily diminished.

It is understandable, then, that for many energy producers and other actors in Hokkaido, the government’s promise of high-tech energy management solutions and digitisation fails to match many key concerns emerging in Hokkaido around independence and disaster preparedness, even as the local use of IoT technologies increases somewhat. The earthquake and subsequent power outage has taught energy producers and residents of Hokkaido that the introduction of higher-level systems and increased interconnection also implies an increased risk of cascading failure that leaves their older parents, their rural business, their friends with disabilities and many more especially vulnerable to further power outages, and to their at worst fatal consequences (Graham 2010; Howe et al. 2015). In other words, local actors have taken in the idea of digitised energy systems and the value of local independence (adopted from European experts they have come into contact with). Yet, underinvestment and disasters render this future vision for Hokkaido’s ageing and fragile grid uncertain, instead of focusing on the idea of increasing connection and abstraction through larger grid projects and a mode of digitisation that ignores local self-determination.

Models for Speculation

In the space created between the 2018 earthquake and the Japanese government’s adoption of policies, ideas and technologies from Europe’s development of renewable energy, biogas plant workers and managers are creating a different kind of possibility for energy independence. Bringing together sensors, cows, bacteria, plants and humans by redirecting excess heat in greenhouses, they create an energy system less reliant on the grid, the government and the energy markets. I propose to take this as another kind of model, that is in the sense of models as ‘specially prepared, usually fictional descriptions of the system under study’ (Cartwright 1983, p. 158), operating as speculative instruments (Black 1962; Richards 1955). Using this model, I end by sharing a slightly speculative look into what living with less abstracted energy might look like.

We can begin with how biogas producers in central Hokkaido have taken to thinking about how to best care for methanogenic bacteria as part of a different, emerging energy future. These bacteria are bought through farm equipment providers, but once they are added to the mix of cow waste, they are entirely in the care of farmers and technicians. The bacteria help to get rid of excess waste that cannot be turned into fertiliser, as the farm has grown and consolidated others over the years. These human actors try to keep the tanks warm, experimenting with the bacteria feed to get them to digest and produce more methane gas. Most of the methane is burned with German generators and the electricity bought at a fixed rate by the utilities, later it may be traded on the market. Certain plants are developing the means to liquefy and move biogas to help their community become more energy independent.

The humans have been coaxed by their boss into going about the task of diverting some of the excess heat into water that circulates to warm a greenhouse. In some places, the heat of these greenhouses and water tanks is monitored and controlled by sensors and controllers communicating constantly (Fig. 1). They need to pay careful attention to the cows, bacteria and plants to maintain these cycles. Excess gas may be liquefied and transported short distances to meet local demand in an emergency. Energy becomes a function of caring for several types of living beings and machines. Perhaps the system is still not sustainable or carbon neutral, having not freed itself from petroleum inputs by substituting it with hydrogen and other alternatives. However, it does provide a way to not only reduce emissions but make the use and production of energy a more immediately material and sensory process, even though it produces several kinds of abstractions through sensor data and emissions data. Local politicians and biogas operators imagine a future of multispecies heat, sharing, sensing and moving it between cows, machines, bacteria, fermentation tanks and homes.

Fig. 1
A photograph of a greenhouse farm, which is monitored and controlled by sensors and controllers.

(Source Photo by author)

A greenhouse warmed by excess heat from biogas with sensors for temperature control

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Though not all of the above are things I have seen directly in my fieldwork at biogas plants—for instance not every plant has a greenhouse and the technology to liquefy and move biogas remains in early development—every element of the amalgam remains grounded in my experience and biogas producers’ projections for the future as well as their understandings of the government’s Regional Circulation Co-Existence Sphere. I use this slightly speculative passage to emphasise the departure this could represent from the history of energy as a process that many of us have experienced as one of continuous abstraction. Though perhaps not ‘revolutionary infrastructure’ (Boyer 2016), as this would represent too much of a departure from the language and practices of my informants, it does represent an alternative to the seemingly ever-expanding ‘gridworld’ (Boyer 2016) or ‘program Earth’ (Gabrys 2016). Leaving evolutionary schemes and the idea of bounded cultures aside, the idea of energy as a flowing mediator between various states of matter, and more-than-human dependencies, is an interesting hermeneutic for the Anthropocene. This is true as well for the relationships between the digital and the analogue, and how to relate to plans for Society 5.0: the material movements of energy production serve as infrastructure for all digital realities, just as these in turn require changes to this energy infrastructure to match changing geographies of use and medianatures (Parks 2017). A de-leveraging of these nesting abstracted energy infrastructures could allow us not only to prosume but to become caregivers, echoing the activism of youth in Stavanger in Lautrup’s chapter in this book.

What speculation allows for here is a slowing down and reimagination of the experience of energy (Debaise and Stengers 2016) in a way that is still enmeshed with digital sensors and data feeds, as well as generators and development models imported from Europe, but nonetheless remains separate from a more complete abstraction of energy by relying on a mediated sensory interplay between multiple more-than-human actors. Similarly, the local independence and ownership promoted by European experts becomes all the more difficult and more politically charged to implement in a context like Hokkaido, where connections to the mainland may be weaker than those between Germany and its neighbours, for instance. In reality, the gridworld and its imperative of increased interconnection, increasingly rapid exchange, virtual control, as well as rural precarity and dependency seem likely to continue to live on in national policy in Japan. However, this does not preclude parallel infrastructures like biogas from moving through more sensory networks. Indeed, the government relies on such local success cases to tout the viability of its own Society 5.0, opening up the possibility for less abstracted, multispecies and lived-with forms of energy. Even as digital technologies continue to change the materiality of energy production and use, they may also do so in ways that may not always lead to building greater and greater abstractions. Exhibition Fig. 4 follows this chapter.

Exhibition Fig. 4
A photograph depicts the settings of an oil rig based on U R O.

(Source Rune Egenes and Norwegian Petroleum Museum [used with permission])

‘Uro’ in its setting on an oil rig with a view over Ryfylke fjord

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