Between Aeolus and Poseidon: The construction of offshore wind energy in Portugal

Drawing on ongoing multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, the poster examines how offshore wind energy is anticipated, planned, and legitimised in Portugal. In February 2025, the Offshore Renewable Energy Allocation Plan (PAER) designated 2,711 km² of the Atlantic continental shelf for commercial development, framed as a cornerstone of national decarbonisation. The research argues that, long before turbines reach the sea, the energy transition is already underway in the meeting rooms of state agencies, at industry conferences, in fishers' harbours, and in the reports and maps that render the ocean as an allocable space. Two questions guide the inquiry: how does the anticipation of offshore wind produce the sea as an infrastructural space and as a 'green' future, and how is that future governed, contested, and inhabited before it materialises? Fieldwork began in October 2025, centred on the Directorate-General for Natural Resources, Safety and Maritime Services (DGRM), industry summits, interviews with state and industry actors, and soon to be extended to fishing communities in Figueira da Foz. Three early on themes emerge from this early material: transition as downward outreach, where communities figure as audiences to be "educated" rather than interlocutors; extractive genealogies, where decarbonisation is legitimised through analogies with historical cycles of national wealth, such as the colonial gold rush in Brazil; and naturalised consent, where objections to territorial impacts are deflected through non-human figures, such as sheep said to "prefer" the shade of solar panels, passing as ecological evidence. The arguments are presented through a series of ethnographic vignettes drawn from energy industry events (2025–2026).