UC Santa Barbara

California is at the cusp of an energy transformation. Actors in the energy network strive to Decarbonize the grid by manifesting a Just Transition, to Decentralize the grid by implementing distributed energy resources, and to Democratize energy procurement by establishing locally controlled public agencies called community choice aggregators (CCAs). In this dissertation, I use a grounded theory approach to study the developing energy transformation in Santa Barbara County, California, a key site of environmental struggle in the midst of ecological crisis, and ask, What kinds of challenges confront local actors attempting to undergo energy transformations? To answer this question, I synthesize four years of ethnographic study and participant observation to trace three ongoing processes of energy transformation in Santa Barbara County: (1) attempts by environmental groups, environmental justice movement actors, and building trades unions to together advocate for clean energy projects; (2) contestations about whether and how to decentralize the existing grid; and (3) changes to the organizational structure of energy procurement. I track these processes as they move within and reorganize the common energy actor–network constituted by political, industry, labor, and civil society organizations as well as technological assemblages and broader ecologies. In the process, I elaborate the energy democracy framework by attending to broader literatures of technology, ecology, and organizations, analyzing this domain with actor–network theory, and inflecting its normative commitments with Aristotelian virtue ethics. In Part I, I highlight the importance of deliberation and threats posed by downstreaming and premature closure, arguing that that efforts to decarbonize without attending to democracy are unlikely to be just. In Part II, I trace the fact–building contestations involved in negotiating the transition from Macro– to Microgrid, a process which will optimally involve creating risk–philic systems integrated on the local level. In Part III, I consider the contradictions between bureaucracy and democracy as CCAs strive to realize economies of scale; I characterize CCAs as heterogenous actor–networks that bridge, set goals, and protect their technical cores in ways that often subvert doctrinal commitments. I conclude by proposing that Decarbonization, Decentralization, and Democratization weave a threefold cord wherein each is optimal and necessary, though taken alone insufficient, to a just energy transformation.