Energy, its infrastructures and the everyday: challenges of sensing the intangible

Nathalie Bergame: Bue, do you want to begin with a poem this time?

Bue Juul Poulsgaard: Yes, of course, let me try.

Bright sun, summer in May

Timer set, click clack, scribble, rip, stick,

The soundscape for breaking new ground.

Bue: Gothenburg. Monday morning. The first two-day workshop of Energy Lives! with the aim of bringing together members of the project and distinguished scholars within the fields of history of senses and emotions to discuss intersections between energy history, history of the senses and history of emotions. Usually, I do not sleep well on first nights away from home, but for some reason this was not the case this time. Waking up, I felt equally curious, excited, and nervous for the day. The nervousness, however, dissipated over breakfast as most of us met in this informal setting only to decide to travel to the conference venue by ferry. I remember that when crossing the river to its southern shore someone read out loud the weather forecast promising temperatures above 20 degrees – summer in May! Highly unusual for the season, it was therefore something we came back to again and again over the two days. For me, the heat was a very tangible reminder of changes to the climate; unusual weather becoming a new norm.

Our first day at the workshop in Gothenburg was spent in what locals call the Hydrogen Dome of Sweden, located in the middle of Campus Lindholmen at Chalmers University. The name stems from this being a former hydrogen innovation hub, now home to a company striving to establish a network of hydrogen filling stations with decentralised production of green hydrogen – but also an event space. While the dome was heated by the sun, the meeting room in the middle of the dome was comfortably cooled by A/C – a great venue for talking about senses and emotions in relation to energy and infrastructures.

Nathalie: Thank you, Bue. Before diving into my take-aways from the workshop, let me start with some of the questions our EL! project team prepared prior to the workshop.

One of the questions you, Bue, had before coming to the workshop was “how can we sense something that is intangible – electricity for instance or central heating infrastructures hidden from the senses?” Rebecca Wright gave some answers to this: she said that one way to make energy tangible is through pre-paymeters as objects that connect the heating system to people’s visual sense, showing how much heat has been consumed. This also touched upon Finn-Arne Jørgensen’s question about the technological mediation of “energy emotions” - with pre-paymeters being one way of mediating and maybe affecting how we relate emotionally to energy. Yet, another venue for this could also be to focus on the effects of heating and electricity systems on the body. Cold, for instance, can be felt in the body as a feeling of pain. A sensation that will feel different. Rebecca explained that people who were used to a central heating place in their homes, like a fireplace, were found to dismiss heated floors of modern buildings based on their bodily memory and the way they were used to experiencing heat.

Talking about how heat norms are handed down from our parents and across generations, our discussion addressed the emotion of shame in relation to one’s heat needs. Anna Åberg mentioned that she still reproduces the heat norms of her family despite her needs perhaps being different (e.g. desiring the home to be warmer than the norm she grew up around). We also talked about how heat norms not only are socially reproduced, but how they are also based on bodily memory, that is, how am I used to feel heat also shapes how I will interpret heat in environments that are based on different heat sources. I guess this is a decisive problem when trying to switch energy systems and transition whole energy infrastructures – people need to be onboard from a social and cultural norm perspective, something that also relates to class structures. But a shift in heating system also requires a re-education of the body to appreciate heat differently. I think this sensory legacy of energy paradigms is what Kristian Hvidtfelt Nielsen tried to understand, too.

While it may be possible to explore sensory legacies of energy uses, Simeon Koole cautioned that it might be impossible to really understand past sensory experiences. How can we viscerally understand the past if not only energy systems have changed but also bodies and their ways of making sense of heat. Some scholars, he told us, argue that we can only ever understand the meaning of past experiences but will fail to truly understand and therefore study past sensory experiences. One way forward then could be to focus on practices, he suggested - energy practices.

Bue: Thank you, Nathalie. I also found Simeon’s notion of practices of energy as a possible focus of investigation very interesting. When Kristian asked Simeon about crises as focal points for investigating transitions of energy infrastructures and perhaps also practices, Simeon mentioned “friction of the senses” as potential analytical focal points. I understood it as referring to the sensation of resistance or to the difficulty encountered when the brain processes sensory information, particularly but not exclusively in the context of touch, or the perception of friction between surfaces. This could also involve interpretations of force, vibration, and movement involved in tactile interactions. Simeon was interested in joining this “friction of the senses” with research on energy infrastructure. Infrastructure procures, refines, produces and distributes energy to be consumed when performing practices and in this relation lies an aspect of friction. I think an example of this could be how a power blackout introduces friction as there is no power, thereby making practices reliant hereof impossible. In this sense friction is then how noticeable or sensible energy is or is not, or the infrastructure itself. This is of course not universal for all individuals as no two people are the same. It is determined by experience and circumstance, leading to different thresholds when friction leads to change or transition between people and their relation to infrastructure. In other words, the degree of friction is variable but constantly present. Simeon also mentioned that friction is not only negative as too much friction could lead to changes or transitions in the infrastructure. In this way a high degree of friction could lead to advancements in infrastructure. An example of this would be how the share of renewable energy sources is increasing in energy consumption due to the climate crisis. Rebecca also talked about this, not using the term “friction” but by looking at practices of heat. In line with this one could ask might it be the perception of “too much friction” with an energy regime that leads people to either change their practices of energy or in turn adapt to a new energy regime altogether? What are the limits of people’s agency in this?

Nathalie: Interesting Bue, I had not really thought about frictions so much, maybe more about contradictions. Contradictions in the meaning of how energy systems are not only technically but also socially, economically, and politically conditioned as well as climate-based, and how different forces within these areas form energy systems – a change in one of the contingently related aspects affects the parts of the rest of the system too. I also learned from your thoughts that while I have understood energy systems as given, I have underestimated the agency we still have when it comes to energy practices – meaning, I might have floor heating but I can decide to not use it and use the fireplace instead. So, I am not determined by the energy system, and the emotions and bodily register and past relation to heat will affect how I engage with that energy system. Thereby, focusing on energy practices is a relevant analytical focal point in the study of energy systems and their relation to people.

On another note, the workshop made me also wonder whether the domestic space could maybe figure as the analytical focal point for understanding and sensing energy infrastructures. It strikes me that it is here where people are connected to energy infrastructure in a tangible way, in a direct way, through heating for example. We spoke also about that in some parts of the world, energy is in a sense “clinically removed” (Simeon Koole) for instance through the transition away from coal in fireplaces, stoves and individual boilers for domestic heating. You mentioned that too, Bue, that we don’t engage with energy haptically anymore. I think you said: “we don’t touch it with our hands”. So how can we study it then with a focus on senses? I guess I am coming back to this question, and the theme of this blogpost, the intangibility of the energy system. If this is true, can energy infrastructures maybe then be studied through practices of the everyday, in the kitchen for preparing food, in personal hygiene like shower, heating domestic spaces? Can this be a proxy?

Bue: I very much agree and share your fascination. It is the effects or practices of energy that are tangible - light in the bulbs, the brewing of coffee, heat radiating from the floor or the radiator. And I have asked myself that question since joining the project as I am looking into district heating in Denmark. As an infrastructure of magnitude that connects enormous facilities through vast webs of pipes with the internal heat infrastructure of individual housing, district heating has in many instances been portrayed as an infrastructure of comfort, as people no longer had to worry about heat, as it was available at all times of the day, without them lifting a finger for it. Perhaps lessening the perception of friction? This is one of the obvious advantages of district heating, whereas the disadvantages are much less obvious but nonetheless engraved in the fabricof the infrastructure: the derived intangibility of energy. The alienation of individual haptic engagement with energy, in this case heat, for people, might make the connections between practices of energy with production of energy and the derived greenhouse gas emissions intangible. The connection between the practice of heating and district heating as an infrastructure might be intangible, but heat in the domestic space or the absence hereof is still very tangible. I mention this as I think of the domestic space as a place of intersection between a multitude of infrastructures enabling all kinds of practices. These practices are influenced by past emotions and sensory impressions but also constituting for the infrastructure as it has to adapt to how people engage with it or understand it.

Nathalie: One point I want to make to conclude is that, maybe intangibility is just the correct description of our times. Maybe we in the Nordic region are sensorically alienated from centralized energy infrastructures, maybe that this is already a finding. But this severance is nonetheless felt and sensed, but maybe not in major ways, but in minor ways. I think this is a way forward for me at least, looking for granularity and muteness in senses and feelings. I think Kristian mentioned this as well, that scholars in the field of STS are looking into blind spots - things that are missing. If I am sitting here in my study at home and not feeling cold or warm, feeling in fact comfortable, then this is a sensation too. I think it will do me good to not look at extremes. This is also what I learned from speaking to Lena Ferriday, to think about the “slighter” sensations, not only the extremes. And this makes me also remember my conversation with Mattin Biglari, who works on oil refineries in Iran: he made me aware of something else I was not thinking of before, namely that in the Middle East, folklore around oil fields are often coinciding with the presence of spirits and other guardians of the land.   It made me think that maybe it is precisely that, namely traditional knowledges of connecting to the land and its energy sources that modernity has successfully eradicated. Since I am looking at oil refineries and its effects on social reproductive labour, I believe looking into energy practices in the domestic leads me into some sort of dead end – oil refineries are not really felt in the home unless they are close by and one can smell the exhaust from gas stacks burning off excess gas. Here maybe, I need to take in the land more, and the way how energy infrastructures of oil have transformed the landscapes.

Bue: Wow, very interesting. Maybe you are going a bit beyond, but I think you might be onto something. I think this eradication of the connection between our actions and practices and their impact on our surroundings could also explain the tendency to forget oneself and our individual everyday practices when talking about energy and the climate. This alienation also poses challenges for us as historians. A question that kept coming up during the workshop was how to identify sources to engage with something so vague and yet very complex as energy and the senses and emotions? After the workshop I then remembered something Mattin Biglari mentioned. A key take-away from his talk about his research on labour in Iranian oil industries was how he advocated for reading against the grain. Mattin reasoned that a case or subject might be so ubiquitous that people do not write about it, or it simply goes unnoticed. Another aspect could also be that someone would not want something to be recorded or want it recorded in a certain way. For instance, an oil refinery might not want it documented how much their operations actually pollute. He advocated for the senses as the key to unlock the door to understanding human agency in relation to energy infrastructures. A different approach to overcoming this problem was presented by Lena Ferriday. She advocated for embodied methods for sensory energy history, with her own research into embodiment in the mining industry in Cornwall in 1850-1910. Here she used her own body and senses as a tool for fieldwork to the places she would read about and investigate through the archival sources, before and after archival research. In turn this helped her make reflections on the embodied experiences she found in the sources. I think reading against the grain will be something I have to do, as there are a lot of literature and information on district heating in Denmark from the industry itself. At the same time, I think embodied research could be a means to complement the reading against the grain.

Nathalie: Yes. So maybe one way forward is then to transcend the alienation from energy infrastructures, if only analytically, by way of bringing forth energy emotions and sensing energy practices – describing how it feels and what it means for my life to live close to an oil refinery, to use fossil fuels, use different heating systems. Because energy systems will be changing and have always been changing, and with them, people’s lives have been changing. People and energy infrastructures are dialectically related to each other, we are shaped by those infrastructures, they shape our practices and emotions, they can be sensed through different means. But, because we have a body, because we can sense them, because they are registered by the body, we shape them, we as a society design them, interact with them, ignore them, rebel against them. Let's see where this leads us in the upcoming months where we will be writing more about the history of emotions in relation to energy infrastructures.

We would like to thank Rebecca Wright (Northumbria University), Simeon Koole (University of Bristol), Lena Ferriday (King’s College London), and Mattin Biglari (University of Bristol) for taking the time to share their research and to think about possible future research with us.

If you are interested in their work, here is a selection of suggested readings:

• Mattin Biglari, “Toxic Standards: Pollution, ‘Slow Violence’, and the Environmental History of the Abadan Oil Refinery, Iran” Journal of Energy History no 12, 1, doi: 10.3917/jehrhe.012.0111
• Lena Ferriday, “A Sense of Class: Representations of Embodiment in Cornwall’s Subterranean Environments, ca. 1850–1910,” Environment and History 31, no 2 (2025): 213-234; doi: 10.3828/whpeh.63861480327332
• Simeon Koole, “How We Came to Mind the Gap: Time, Tactility, and the Tube,” Twentieth Century British History 27, no 4 (2016): 524-554; doi: 10.1093/tcbh/hww038
• Rebecca K. Wright, “Mass Observation and the Emotional Energy Consumer,” Canadian Journal of History 53, no 3 (2018): 423-449; doi: 10.3138/cjh.ach.53.3.04