Solar Pioneers

Scholars, activists, and politicians attempt to provoke urgent climate action by christening 2050 as the decisive date by which the United States must transition from fossil fuels. But I contend that calendrical teleologies do not actually motivate the everyday people, activists, and workers leading the U.S. energy transition. This article explores another temporal schema seemingly unrelated to climate: the American pioneer settling the frontier, realizing his destiny through individual initiative. I contend that this origin story works in tandem with contemporary entrepreneurialism to affectively animate a market-based approach to energy transitions that is anything but rapid. Thus, consideration of frontier temporalities can contextualize the sluggish pace of decarbonization. While many studies identify various catalysts of renewable energy adoption, my analysis of “the renewable energy frontier” suggests that these inquiries overlook the insidious individualism of energy transitions in a capitalist context, in which “the market” is misunderstood as an accelerator of change.

Action (physics) · Destiny (ISS module) · Energy transition · Frontier · Pace · Renewable energy · Schema (genetic algorithms) · Temporalities · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Social Acceptance of Renewable Energy · Sustainability and Climate Change Governance