Neighboring with energy

As historians researching how people live with and through energy transitions, we are not satisfied with documents and archives alone. In the Energy Lives! project, it matters that we get into the field, engage with places and communities, and hear people’s stories about how energy infrastructures intersect with their lives and homes. In October 2025, the Energy Lives! team gathered in Finland for a week of collaborative fieldwork. This first of three annual fieldwork weeks planned in the project offered lessons in neighboring: of being aware of each other; of giving, claiming, and not surrendering space; of seeing and being seen; and sometimes of withholding insight.

We started the week at the Kuusijärvi smoke sauna near the airport while we waited for the last arrivals. In the soot-dark room we surrendered to the heat, crammed onto wooden benches, bodies unseen. The wood-fired hot sauna stones glowed faintly and the löyly steam burned on our skin. We stepped into the light and cooled off in the fall air and the nearby lake. The smoke clung to us for hours, a reminder that some experiences linger rather than being seen. Sauna set the week’s theme: energy lives are felt on and experienced through bodies, seen and unseen as they negotiate contact, distance, and boundaries situated in place.

Our fieldwork took us to different energy infrastructures placed along the coast, showing how energy production not only shapes landscapes but is also defined by these. We spoke with long-term neighbors to the Sköldvik oil refinery south of Porvoo, built in the mid-1960s and today the largest refinery operated by the Finnish company Neste. We met retired engineers and company representatives from Fortum’s Loviisa nuclear power plant, whose two reactors have been operative since 1977 and 1981. In Naantali, we sat down with municipal planners, land developers, and Neste representatives to learn about the recently decommissioned refinery there. Across all three locations, we saw how industrial siting often follows environmental affordances such as deep-water shipping lanes, rail, road access, and distance to housing to minimize conflict. Yet these sites inevitably also neighbor people, including the many summer houses along the Finnish coast. Just as inevitably, living with energy production creates tensions. Communities form around industrial sites, adapt to them, often depend on them, and sometimes organize in resistance.

On several occasions during our fieldwork, we were reminded that we were dealing with critical infrastructure, not only in its capacity to generate and transport energy for industries and daily life, but also in its larger geopolitical setting. The Sköldvik refinery firmly kept our bodies at a distance, leaving the site something to be observed from afar, as part of the landscape or seen from space on satellite imagery. At the Loviisa nuclear power plant we could drive up to the gate and park but were asked not to photograph the gate itself. Instead, a nearby floating leisure boat dock provided us with a good view of the two nuclear cooling towers neighbored by summer houses: an idyllic scene with a soundtrack of birds, waves, wind, boats, and nuclear turbine whir. In Naantali, a stern Neste manager drove us through the oil storage facilities. No photos allowed; this was for our eyes only. Like in so many other spaces where people are kept out, wildlife had flourished—deer and moose walked freely where we could not.

Touring, circling, observing these energy infrastructures gave us some insight into their spatial characteristics, yet it was from people and their stories that we saw beyond the immediate surface and learned about the intertwined histories of people and place in these sites. The sites were all picked for infrastructural development for particular reasons that all made sense. Following their establishment, people needed to learn to be neighbors with these energy infrastructures, with many people being both local residents and representatives of the companies that operated the sites. Incidents like an oil spill documented by a local newspaper in December 1970 remind both us and residents that neighboring requires trust.

For all their problematic histories and enforced boundaries, the sites held a certain attraction to us; we’re infrastructure geeks, and their strange, compelling charisma drew us in. Oil refineries have their own sublime, as light dwindles and the bright flares on top of tall pipe chimneys pop out in the darkness. At Loviisa I felt the particular gravitational pull of nuclear plants, envisioning the concentrated and domesticated power generated out of sight, yet backlit by Fukushima’s afterimage and Chernobyl’s fallout that still lingers in Nordic forests and in reindeer lichen in the mountains. Despite their firm boundaries, such sites draw the eye. But charisma makes looking easy; living next to such sites is the hard part. We were only visitors, not neighbors. Our visit demonstrated that sites like Sköldvik keep trespassers out, yet trespass on the senses. Sight and sound spill into the surroundings, and sometimes chemicals do too. The issue is not visibility, but whose terms define it.

Our fieldwork brought us close to these energy production sites so that we could learn how people live with energy. The contrast with distant power production is striking. For example, hydropower, which is so central to Norwegian electricity, can be managed remotely. It shapes rivers and seasons, but often as an absent neighbor. Decisions are made elsewhere, control dashboards are placed far away, turbines are muffled underground. Local plants such as the ones we visited, however, are far more present neighbors. They are highly visible in the landscape. They meet you with fences, signs, and protocols. Some distances keep things legible; others keep them out of reach. Proximity invites care and negotiation, though often with tension; distance invites abstraction and might be easier but might also lead to a lack of care.

Coming together as a team for a week in Finland and then separating again to go home to our respective countries, reminded me that neighboring is maintenance. In an era of harder borders, hotter debates, and higher stakes, successful energy transitions will depend on how well we learn to be neighbors with the things that power us and how firmly we ask those things to be better neighbors in return. Ultimately, we (em)power each other.

We would like to say thank you to the people we met during our fieldwork and for sharing their stories.