Abstract Summary
Wind energy is increasingly seen as a means to accelerate the low-carbon energy transition in cities. This leads to the emergence of wind energy visions which describe how cities with an extensive presence of wind turbines might look like in the future. However, urban wind energy visions are not just descriptive. In order to make their visions plausible, their producers have to act intentionally and destabilize existing material, social, and institutional orderings in cities. Thus, visions are also performative, mobilizing a wide range of processes leading to the transformation of multiple urban socio- technical systems and opening up new ways of integrating wind energy in the urban environment. Drawing on vanguard visions and urban assemblages, the paper explores the role of wind energy visions in integrating wind energy in the urban built environment. This paper investigates how producers of rooftop wind energy visions interfere in and destabilize sustainable building assemblages and restabilize them into new configurations. The paper focuses on the case of the Power Nest solution. Power Nest is a roof-mounted wind and solar energy system developed by the Dutch startup Ibis Power. As such, the PowerNest solution represents a vision of turning buildings into self-contained units of energy production and consumption by installing wind turbines on rooftops. The paper explores how Ibis Power representatives act to materialize the PowerNest vision and how they intervene in the sustainable building assemblage and how their interventions affect various elements of the assemblage, including urban material forms, socio-material orderings, and socio-professional relationships.
