Around the world today, energy transition is already in process, as a material reality and an unfolding set of practices. While investors and developers often frame energy transitions as a process of piloting and scaling up renewable solutions, geographic scholarship repositions scale as relational. Bridging insights from scalar work in energy geographies and energy justice scholarship, this article recenters scale as an unfolding field of contestation. Drawing empirically from extended ethnographic engagement in Jordan, I trace new flows of capital, knowledge, and power across city, national, and regional borders to understand how the scales of energy transition are actively made and unmade. From rooftop solar oases to desert wind plantations, the divergent spatial forms of renewable development in Jordan reflect distinct legal-financial configurations and property arrangements. Each configuration enacts a different set of financial priorities and landscape transformations, revealing pivotal tensions within the unfolding political ecology of global energy transitions. I focus on two key elements of renewable energy finance: legal arrangements and land relations, as the constitutive ground through which multi-scalar conflicts are mediated. I argue that multi-scalar tensions of utility, industrial, and residential renewable energy development reveal both the power and limits of contemporary investor-led decarbonization strategies. I approach Jordan’s renewable energy transition as a generative aperture for theorizing just power through the tensions that mark the present global conjuncture of climate and political-economic crisis.
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