This workshop will be based on pre-circulated papers and thus have mandatory registration. Interested discussants are nevertheless welcome. Please contact tensions.energy@gmail.com beforehand to sign up and receive the Zoom link.

In recent years, many historians of energy have related their work to contemporary debates about energy transitions and examined past changes in energy provision from a variety of perspectives. Those include shifts between specific energy carriers or technologies, grand transitions between energy regimes, deep transitions, infrastructure transitions, case studies of socio-technical transitions, to name but a few. While this research has vastly increased our knowledge on past processes, structures, actors, dynamics of energy production and consumption, and patterns of transitions, there has been little systematic discussion on how historians should best deal with the – admittedly presentist – “transitions” paradigm.

This half-day online workshop seeks to facilitate discussion particularly on the following (but also other) questions:
- Which kinds of transitions should historians focus on?
- What are the pitfalls of focusing on “transitions” and not continuities?
- Which theoretical approaches and concepts have proven to be helpful when examining historical transitions (from your experience)?
- How can historians examine “transitions in scale” from low to high levels of energy consumption?
- How can we approach changes within established energy patterns, such as from low to high levels of electricity use in households?
- Should historians prioritize transitions in energy production or consumption?
- Should we only examine successful transitions, or also “failed” or “aborted” ones? What can be learned from looking at “failures”?
- Or, alternatively, should historians abandon the transitions paradigm altogether, and instead focus on continuities, energy “additions”, or “transformations”?