Seeing like a renewable energy company: Solar prospecting through surface vision

Abstract

Based on ethnographic research with renewable energy companies in the United Kingdom, this article examines how developers see and produce space for solar energy extraction. In tracing these practices, I show that this work relies on a distinct mode of seeing that I term surface vision. Surface vision describes a learned, embodied, and socially mediated way of seeing that has emerged in relation to the materialities of solar irradiation. I demonstrate that prospecting for solar energy is a practice oriented less toward locating ‘solar resources’ and more toward assessing the conditions that make sustained extraction possible over time. Through surface vision, developers engage with and organize space around future and ongoing flows of energy, thereby extending extractive logics into new temporal and spatial registers. Drawing on critical engagements with energy geographies, GIS, and the visual cultures of extractivism, I illustrate how epistemic frameworks and technological infrastructures are mobilized by industrial actors to produce and legitimate sites of extraction, demonstrating how extractivist logics endure in, and are reconstituted by, new energy regimes.