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Over the past three decades, new off-grid electrification infrastructures – as micro-grids and other solar solutions – have moved from innovative initiatives, conducted by NGOs and private stakeholders, to a credible model promoted by international organizations for electrification of rural areas in developing countries. Multiple conditions support their spread: major technological advances in the field of renewable energies (panels, batteries), intensive Chinese industrial production allowing lower prices, institutional reforms in Africa including these solutions in major national electrification programmes, and, finally, an opening to the private sector as a supposed guarantee of the projects’ viability. However, while the development of this market calls for significant investments, a vast set of calculations and a strong “micro-capitalist” doctrine, all involved in their design, experts admit that a large proportion of projects hardly survive or even fail.

This chapter investigates these failures by exploring the ecology of such infrastructures, designed for “the poor.” It discusses “thinking infrastructures” in terms of longevity by focusing on economic failures risks. The authors argue that the ecology of the infrastructure integrates various economic conversions and exchanges chains expected to participate in the infrastructure’s functioning. By following energy access solutions for rural Africa in sub-regions of Senegal and Madagascar, from their political and technical design to their ordinary life, the authors examine the tensions and contradictions embedded within the scripts of balance supposed to guarantee their success.

The chapter analyses the role of smart grid technology in the German energy transition. Information technologies promise to help integrate volatile renewable energies (wind and solar power) into the grid. Yet, the promise of intelligent infrastructures does not only extend to technological infrastructures, but also to market infrastructures. Smart grid technologies underpin and foster the design of a “smart” electricity market, where dispersed energy prosumers can adapt, in real time, to fluctuating price signals that register changes in electricity generation. This could neutralize fluctuations resulting from the increased share of renewables. To critically “think” the promise of smart infrastructure, it is not enough to just focus on digital devices. Rather, it becomes necessary to scrutinize economic assumptions about the “intelligence” of markets and the technopolitics of electricity market design. This chapter will first show the historical trajectory of the technopolitical promise of renewable energy as not only a more sustainable, but also a more democratic alternative to fossil and nuclear power, by looking at the affinities between market liberal and ecological critiques of centralized fossil and nuclear based energy systems. It will then elucidate the co-construction of smart grids and smart markets in the governmental plans for an “electricity market 2.0.” Finally, the chapter will show how smart grid and smart metering technology fosters new forms of economic agency like the domo oeconomicus. Such an economic formatting of smart grid technology, however, forecloses other ecologically prudent and politically progressive ways of constructing and engaging with intelligent infrastructures.

This chapter presents a South American perspective on the environmental and financial sustainability of energy integration incorporating recent financial lessons from the United States and Europe. An illustrative project called UNASUR-GRID is presented to highlight new thinking on funding ecologically sensitive development (post-carbon electricity generation) and regional energy sovereignty via a new regional development bank for the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) called Bank of the South, Banco del Sur (BDS) ^1,2 . Sustainable BDS finance rules are presented that aim to break the link between development funding, environmental damage, and sovereign debt owed to banks outside the region, tapping into alternative finances to buffer the region against changes in global financial flows from core nations in the Great Recession.

The author attended presidential meetings of MERCOSUR and UNASUR supplementing this with presidential declarations comparing these with ongoing development planning from IIRSA, also interviewing a COSIPLAN representative. He also cooperated (as an independent researcher) with the Ecuadorian Central Bank research group called ‘New Architectures for Regional Finance’ (NAFR) and conducted technical interviews at South American energy institutes specialising in integration.

Development finance must reflect changes in both energy supply and demand while replacing fossil fuel inputs in electricity generation. Demand planning is necessary to attain sovereignty over a post-carbon electricity supply while maintaining dependability.

Successful energy cooperation is more than just energy infrastructure (UNASUR-GRID), cross-border confidence building is also required, reinforced by commercial treaties for energy exports and imports. Public and private national and regional energy companies need real incentives to trade internationally (improving competition) or renationalisation of supply and distribution may be necessary.

Highly original, this chapter incorporates government, UN and civil NGO inputs into primary research. BDS policy sources include government, ministerial and presidential speeches with interviews and participation in meetings with social movements. For indigenous ecological and social economic concepts such as Sumak Kawsay, the author has travelled extensively in South America and was an active participant at the first World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the 2010 Rights of Mother Earth (World Conference on Indigenous Peoples, 2014) in Cochabamba, Bolivia, along with ecologists and tribal representatives.

Purpose: The availability of resilient energy infrastructure and services is crucial to achieving sustainable development goals. However, defined and trustworthy definitions of resilience exist solely for engineering and energy systems, particularly in the industrialised world or metropolitan systems. However, no universally accepted definition considers the distinctive characteristics of rural regions in developing economies. To define resilience for rural power systems in developing countries, this chapter synthesises many perspectives on resilience, energy systems, and rural environments.

Methodology: It draws on extensive literature assessments on resilience, particularly concerning energy systems and rural areas, as well as other pre-existing frameworks.

Findings: To account for the unique challenges of electricity supply in rural developing nations, a comprehensive ‘Rural Power System Resilience Framework’ is introduced, including technical, economic, and social resilience.

Social implications: To better understand the elements contributing to the stability of electricity grids in developing nations and rural areas, this resilience framework may be utilised by global markets, system owners and operators, government officials, non-governmental organisations, and communities.

Originality: Through establishing this framework, this study sets the path for developing suitable and ‘effective resilience standards’ tailored for implementation in these rural areas, with the ultimate goal of facilitating the fulfilment of achieving domestic and worldwide sustainability objectives.

Introduction: Banking institutions are instrumental for lending support and steering the economy in the planned direction to achieve long-term goals. Sustainable development has become the focal point of new policies so that the economies attain inclusive growth. This needs substantial funding to accelerate industrial activity; hence, banks have to play a dominant role in helping such plans succeed. Banks need to look beyond their current framework and play a proactive role in promoting sectors focussed on sustainable development. Banks can prioritise lending to green initiatives to reduce carbon footprint, which will provide impetus to the goals laid out in the COP 26 United Nations (UN) Climate Change Conference. The chapter aims to identify the gap in investment for sustainable development and the funding support required from banks to help India achieve the desired sustainable goals. The chapter recommends that banks increase their green financing to provide the impetus for creating sustainable infrastructure.

Purpose: The present study aims to understand the banking sector’s importance in developing sustainable economic growth through lending practices. The study recommends certain practices for increasing focussed lending towards sustainable projects.

Methodology: In this study, the authors developed prepositions based on a literature review. Significant issues were raised based on the lending policies per the guidelines of Reserve Bank of India (RBI), and a solution was proposed by preparing a conceptual model.

Findings: The study offers a lending technique that can assist the financial sector in supporting sustainable economic growth.

This article traces the regimes of worth that defined energy for centuries as a productive force of human and animal labor, an understanding that transformed in the 18th century to an “industrial-energy” regime of worth supporting an economy of mass production, consumption, and profit and more recently one centered on market forces and price. Industrial and market energy and the conventions and institutions that support them are currently in a period of discursive and material ferment; they are being challenged by different higher order principles of worth. We discuss eight emergent energy justifications that argue what kind of energy is – and is not – in the best interests of society.