Making valuable energy: Public forums, municipal futures, and infrastructural pathways

This article analyzes public discussions and engagements with Philadelphia’s energy system to highlight the degrees of tension between diverse ethical frames and energy-based strategies of value production. Looking at three different instances and genres of energy-transition planning and expression, we argue that any such tensions or alignments turn on the specific units, categories, and scales of analysis used to construct and understand them. Our first section investigates the spatial and temporal frames of “energy security” embedded in Philadelphia’s infrastructure improvement plan, showing how the meaning and political purchase of the concept of “security” changes across quotidian and infrastructural timescales and across the spatial scale of the household, city, state, and the nation. Section two considers the categories with which the City framed its study of potential decarbonization scenarios, pointing towards the way this schema produced its own seemingly intractable ethical and economic impasses. The third and final section looks at the way diverse members of the public successfully de- and re-constructed the study’s categories, scales, and units of analysis, successfully undermining the study’s “grid of intelligibility” and replacing it with their own more equity-centered alternative. Across these three ethnographic engagements, this article brings the anthropologies of ethics and value together in a novel way, showing their mediated entanglement with and within the sphere of public knowledge production. This, we argue, illustrates the seemingly mundane scalar choices that deeply inform our ethical frames and that, in the end, ultimately allow us to make energy valuable.