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09.01.2025
Institutskolloquium IfP (15.01.25): From Big Oil to Big Tech: how energy transitions are changing infrastructure politics
Silvia Weko (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg)
Wednesday, January 15th 2025, 16:00 c.t. / Room 124, Institut für Politikwissenschaft or online via Zoom
About the lecture: The transition from fossil fuels towards renewable energy has the potential to bring about major changes to international politics, but who will benefit from these changes? Often research focuses on the potential for distributed energy resources to enable democratic ownership and distributed value creation. Silvia Weko argues that there is the potential for Big Tech to benefit from the energy transition, as it is already becoming a provider of digital infrastructures and technologies that are crucial to operate renewable energy systems. This talk will explain in-depth how Amazon, Google and Microsoft are taking advantage of this window of opportunity to expand their structural power in the energy sphere ? and what this means for global politics.
Silvia Weko is a postdoctoral researcher at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg Chair for Sustainability Transition Policy. She works on the international political economy of sustainability, with a special focus on energy transitions. Her recent publications on international energy politics include “New Sites of Accumulation? Why Intangible Assets Matter for Energy Transitions” (Review of Political Economy - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09538259.2024.2391304) and “Is renewable energy technology trade more or less conflictive than other trade” (EnergyPolicy - www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301421523001234)