Doctoral Dissertation Research: Navigating and Negotiating Multiple Energy Futures and Infrastructures

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The development of new sources of energy coupled with the dramatic decline in their costs are creating new opportunities and challenges in United States society. This change represents more than a technological shift because it impacts employment and economic organization in several parts of our country. Energy transport infrastructures play a key role in the design and re-design of energy systems by making it possible to scale up such systems, thus more fully and efficiently using new energy sources. Because of these several changes, public conversations about the best ways to access new energy sources provide important information regarding the implications of change in energy sources, particularly the issues of transporting new energy sources to consumers. This project will analyze these public conversations to assess their dynamics as well as their economic and social impacts. Analysis of these cases will help us to understand how these values and visions of the future can become materially embedded through the decisions made around which infrastructures are built. Findings from the project will inform how transitions in the energy industry evolve and are managed by specific communities and by our society more generally, thus informing policymakers at several levels who are responsible for policy governing energy creation, regulation and usage. This project investigates the public and policy conversations surrounding three energy related infrastructure proposals that cover energy transportation. This project relies on a multi-methods approach combining 65 semi-structured in-depth interviews of key stakeholders, content analysis of over 30 local and national newspapers, and key policy and archival materials from regulatory agencies, industry partners, and social movement organizations. Interviews will focus on collecting descriptive accounting and stakeholder perceptions of the events, formal review processes, and subsequent conversations around each proposed project in order to analyze why and how each project was evaluated, discussed, and how competing visions of energy creation and usage were resolved and evolved. Through media content analysis, the project will understand how each project was regionally framed and therefore how these media frames converged with or deviated from those advocated by individual stakeholders and stakeholder groups, across time and the energy cases. The archival document content analysis will shed light on how the federal and state regulatory structures and policy regimes have shaped each discussion. Through this comparative case study of energy infrastructure projects, this project will construct the emerging conversations around and evaluations of the different energy regimes present in our society today. Findings will inform sociological theories regarding energy usage, community transformation, and social change.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.