Debating the sustainability of solar energy: Examining resource construction processes for local photovoltaic projects in France

The growing attention to sustainable transitions suggests that the development of renewable energies is a central pillar of the transition towards low-carbon societies. However, even though the boundary between renewability and sustainability may be considered minimal, renewable does not mean sustainable. This paper adopts a geography of resource perspective to investigate the sustainability of renewable energies as the result of a contextualized construction process at the scale of local energy projects. The first part of the paper examines how sustainability is addressed in the literature and postulates that a relational focus on resource construction processes offers new analytical perspectives for understanding the importance of context in the construction of renewable energy sustainability. Sustainability is specifically described as a political quality distributed among human and non-human actors within a milieu. Drawing from this theoretical construction, an analysis of two case studies of local photovoltaic projects in the French Rhone-Alpes region (southeast France) highlights how an energy resource might be endowed with very different modes of existence (Simondon), among which some appear to be sustainable and others do not. The final part of the paper discusses how a relational framework offers new perspectives to define and move toward more sustainable renewable energy systems.