Interconnection, Obligation, Solar Power, and the Remaking of Energy Citizens on and off the Grid in California

ABSTRACT Electricity grid infrastructures shape future publics and the contours of political belonging or exclusion, including citizenship. But in fire‐prone, more precariously grid‐connected regions in California, experiments with micro‐ and home nanogrids, subsidized by the state and built in many cases with Tesla products, provide new opportunities for thinking about the relationship between energy and citizenship in a 21st‐century United States. Through an ethnographic analysis of two small‐scale renewable energy projects in California, I argue that that the capacity for creating or reinforcing energy citizenship does not lie in specific technologies or scalar deployments in a deterministic fashion, but rather in how users are invited to relate to these projects: as citizens bound to each other through mutuality and entanglement, or as consumers who operate through their own individualized transactions.