Debating energy futures on Lewis: energy transition, the politics of land use and law, and the question of the commons

Drawing on recent ethnographic fieldwork, this chapter explores the possibilities and promises at stake in crafting energy futures on the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides. It addresses the debates that have fractured around one of three large-scale commercial windfarms proposed for the island, as well as its wider experiments with energy decentralisation over the past two decades. Deploying ‘infrastructure’ both as ethnographic research site and conceptual apparatus, the chapter considers how the political and material effects of moves towards renewable energy generation on Lewis are at once reconfiguring and constrained by existing arrangements of power, technology, expertise and - most particularly - the land and legal systems governing crofting. I argue that the effects of transition on Lewis make themselves felt not simply through debates around energy justice per se, but also - and perhaps predominantly - through the politics surrounding transformations in land use.