The Weekly Planet # 10. On Energy Sovereignty

We ended our earlier exploration of metabolic sovereignty with a simple provocation: if sovereignty today is really about governing the flows that let life continue—food, water, energy, information—then power is migrating from palaces and parliaments into pipes, wires, and datacenters. Energy, among those flows, is the tempo-maker. It sets the pace at which factories and cars hum; it choreographs the rhythms of farms, trains, and networks; it determines, in a very literal sense, whose “ordinary life” can be maintained when the extraordinary happens. To ask what energy sovereignty means is to ask who controls life under modern conditions, and on what terms.

First a little recap of last week

Recap

In political philosophy, sovereignty is “supreme authority within a territory”—the power to decide and be obeyed, to legislate and to judge, to represent the polity to others. The image is familiar: Jean Bodin’s indivisible authority, Hobbes’s Leviathan, the Peace of Westphalia’s borders and flags. That image still haunts our legal imagination, though it has been complicated by treaties, markets, human rights, and supranational organizations. Carl Schmitt sharpened the point with an unsettling clarity: sovereign is the one who decides on the exception, the actor who suspends the norms when survival is at stake. If that sounds abstract, translate it into rationing or blackouts during war time, draconian anti-terrorism laws or what might come in the future: declaring certain areas uninhabitable because of flooding or ocean level rise. In the future that all be decided as simply as: we will no longer connect you to the grid.

Systems theory tilts the same question in a different light. Niklas Luhmann’s language of autopoiesis—self-production—tells us that modern societies survive by reproducing the conditions of their own operation, filtering a storm of incoming signals into manageable distinctions, declaring some events “noise” and others “risk,” and stabilizing predictable routines out of the chaos. Using that lens, sovereignty is a way a system keeps itself going, deciding what will count as information and which responses will be recognized as legitimate. Energy infrastructures are not just cables and transformers. They are constitutional devices that make those selections possible, day after day. They are the procedural memory of a polity.

Onward to energy security

Energy Security vs Energy Sovereignty

Once you see energy as constitutional, the familiar distinction between energy security and energy sovereignty comes into focus. Security points to supply: can we keep the lights on through winter? Sovereignty adds authorship: who gets to decide how those lights stay on; whose standards, codes, and algorithms coordinate the flow; which communities have a right to make exceptions when the world misbehaves. In the twentieth century, security could be bought by contracts and protected by navies. Oil and gas were storable, fungible, and choke-pointed; the diplomacy of barrels and pipelines made sense because the material system lent itself to pause and control. Yergin’s histories of the hydrocarbon age - of empires born around wells, of crises organized by embargoes and cartels - read like a constitutional archive of that world. In that world, “supreme authority within a territory” could plausibly be exercised by a ministry and a strategic petroleum reserve.

But the grammar of energy is changing. The center of gravity is shifting from wells to wafers - from geology to manufacturing, from term contracts to learning curves, from sanctions to standards. Call it the electrotech transition: a stack of renewables, batteries, inverters, heat pumps, EVs, smart meters, flexible loads, virtual power plants, and the software that predicts and choreographs them. Instead of hydrocarbons moving through pipes, we get electrons coordinated by code. The strategic assets move with the stack: upstream minerals and midstream cell plants, yes, but also firmware and protocols and interconnection rules. In this new grammar, sovereignty attaches to factories and standards. The chokepoints are gigafactories and HVDC converter stations, not just straits and terminals. A decision on the exception might be a cabinet decree, or it might be a line in an inverter’s configuration file.

This is why the much-discussed split between “petro-bloc” and “electro-state” has more than rhetorical charge. The petro-bloc—think the United States in its exporter mode, Russia, Saudi Arabia—defends a rent-bearing infrastructure of molecules, managing prices and politics through coordinated supply and long-lived assets like LNG terminals and pipelines. The electro-state - China is the paradigmatic case - compounds capacity by manufacturing clean-energy hardware at staggering scale, electrifying demand at home, and exporting the means of electrification abroad. In the first few months of 2025, China added wind and solar at a pace that would have seemed fanciful a decade ago; its EV, battery, and solar supply chains function as both domestic metabolism and foreign policy. The symbolism is even hydraulic. On the Tibetan Plateau, mega-dams on the Yarlung Tsangpo/Brahmaputra are framed at home as clean power and flood control and read downstream as leverage over seasons and futures. The technical debates - how much capacity implies how much storage; how much storage enables how much flow control - do not erase the political message. The power to shape the timing of flows is power over lives structured by those flows.

The Scale of Sovereignty

These large patterns are often staged as geopolitics, but energy sovereignty can also be enacted at much smaller scales. Across Indigenous nations in North America, energy is where self-determination becomes real: tribal solar projects owned and operated on tribal terms, microgrids that feed clinics and schools through storms, governance that no longer waits on distant utilities or federal waivers. In European cities, the remunicipalization of grids and the spread of cooperatives gave citizens not only lower bills but a voice in dispatch decisions and investment priorities, and with that voice came a different kind of consent to the energy transition. Across the world - in Puerto Rican barrios, in Alaskan villages, in Kenyan market towns, the ability to island, i.e., to keep the refrigerators running and the phones charging when the wider system fails, is a series of experiments in energy sovereignty.

The point is not that local always beats central.

The point is that energy sovereignty speaks in the grammar of capability rather than slogans: the capability to generate and store, to decide and revise, to connect and to unplug. There is a difference between autarky and agency. A sovereign village does not have to make every panel or wire; it needs the ability to choose among credible options, to reject coercive dependence, and to declare its own exceptions under lawful conditions when the need arises. The same is true at national scale. A sovereign state in the electrotech era need not domesticate every link of every chain; it needs degrees of freedom: diversified suppliers of key components, open and inspectable standards in the devices it relies on, institutionalized rights for critical facilities and communities to island, binding compacts with neighbors that balance energy benefits with ecological and social obligations. Interdependence, in other words, is not the enemy. Being unable to refuse interdependence is.

Geoeconomics

This is where the new geoeconomics enters. The neoliberal conceit that prices would discipline politics has given way to an era where politics deliberately reshapes prices and production. Industrial policy is back, not as nostalgia but as a recognition that learning curves and economies of scale are not merely market facts but also instruments of power. Subsidies and public-finance cultivate domestic manufacturing of batteries and heat pumps because sovereignty now lives partly in factories. Meanwhile, the “soft” law becomes hard power: grid codes and cyber baselines decide who may plug in and under what obligations; carbon border adjustments export internal climate policy to trading partners; export controls on advanced gear and minerals rewrite competitors’ timelines. Standards and sanctions have become the twin rails on which this world moves.

Old dilemmas are being reframed (not resolved though). A fossil-dependent region can, and does, invoke “energy sovereignty” to justify extracting more coal; a northern capital can, and does, invoke the same phrase to justify measures that keep its households warm when pipelines are turned off. These invocations collide with the planet’s limits. Climate change makes each jurisdiction’s “sovereign choice” a charge against others’ futures. It is too simple to say that a nation’s right to burn coal is sovereignty and any constraint is neocolonial. The smoke crosses borders. At the same time, it is too simple to pretend that a green transition cannot reproduce extractive patterns under a cleaner banner. Photovoltaics can be instruments of dispossession when they fence out pastoralists; wind farms can legitimize occupation when sited on contested land; a “green hydrogen” pipeline can rehearse the old center–periphery relation. Energy sovereignty becomes meaningful when it is owned and governed by those who live with its consequences, not merely when new Teslas replace Mercedes.

Flows and Stocks

The relationship between stocks and flows have changed. Hydrocarbon sovereignty was organized around stocks: inventories, reserves, spare capacity, the timing of embargoes, with flows arriving via tanker. Electrotech sovereignty is organized around flows: spot pricing on grids, the shift from solar to wind power every evening, and the decision to keep the water flowing or to dam it, with the stocks such as batteries and reservoirs acting as a buffer. The twentieth century exception could be staged over months; the twenty-first often arrives in seconds. It is why power system operators suddenly look like constitutional actors; why a firmware update can feel like legislative change; why a predictive model might foreclose options that no parliament debated. We used to imagine sovereignty as decision against a backdrop of stable infrastructure. Increasingly, the infrastructure is where the decision happens.

What, then, would a democratic theory of energy sovereignty look like? It would start from non-domination rather than nostalgia. A community or a country is energy sovereign not when it refuses every connection, but when no external actor - state, firm, cartel, platform - holds arbitrary power over its critical energetic functions. In practice that points to plural manufacturing ecologies so no single jurisdiction can embargo a whole transition; to open standards and inspectable code so exceptions are decided under public law rather than by private push notification; to legal rights to island when defined triggers are met, with clear procedures and remedies; to transboundary compacts that recognize water and energy as linked obligations and apportion both benefits and risks across borders.

Most importantly, we need learning institutions: because electrotech power improves with use, sovereignty requires public capacities that can learn—standards that update continuously, financing that scales what works, civic education that equips people to operate the systems they own. This too is AI, but in human institutions rather than in machines.

And yet one more layer keeps insisting on being named. The more digital the grid becomes, the more our ability to be sovereign in energy depends on our ability to be sovereign in compute. Forecasts, telemetry, dispatch, market clearing, cyber defense—these are computational acts. If they are performed in opaque clouds, under foreign export controls, by models we cannot examine and cannot replace, then our energy sovereignty is conditional on someone else’s uptime and goodwill. This is not an argument against interconnection or against commercial providers. It is a reminder that the blood and the nervous system belong to the same body. Iceland’s data centers, humming on near-total domestic renewables, are a postcard from that entanglement: power births compute; compute governs power. A polity that claims authorship over its energetic reproduction must, sooner or later, take responsibility for the code that conducts the conduct.

So energy sovereignty is a way of reading our infrastructures as constitutional, our standards as jurisdictional, our exceptions as political decisions in technical clothing. It obliges us to speak honestly about dependence and the right to refuse it, about justice and who gets fenced out, about the materiality of learning and the time it takes to scale. It takes seriously the communities for whom sovereignty is not metaphor but daily practice: the tribes that wire their own clinics, the towns that island their own streets, the farmers who irrigate with their own solar pumps. And it asks national capitals to do the slow work of building capability rather than outsourcing responsibility, to cultivate degrees of freedom rather than performative declarations.

Coming up next

In the next movement of this inquiry, we will follow the blood to its partner in life: the nervous system of computation. Compute sovereignty is not a separate question; it is the other face of the same problem. If energy is how a polity keeps itself alive, compute is how it knows what it is doing. The algorithm that sheds your load or bids your battery is already a tiny sovereign, deciding exceptions all day, every day. If we want to live in a republic of infrastructures, we will need to write a constitutional grammar for code as carefully as we have tried to write one for power.