CONTRADICTIONS OF ENERGY: MARKETS, STATES, AND THE STRUGGLE OVER TRANSITION

With Richard Bärnthaler, Ronan Bolton, Melanie Brusseler, Rosie Collington, Cara Daggett, Andreas Folkers, Jan Groos, Jacob Hasselbalch, Canay Özden-Schilling, Melanie Pichler, Daniela Russ, Simon Schaupp, Gregor Semieniuk, Julia Steinberger, Helen Traill, Leon Wansleben, Max Wilken

KEYNOTE BY ADAM TOOZE: 12.11.2026, 18:00-20:00
Adam Tooze holds the Shelby Cullom Davis chair of History at Columbia University and serves as Director of the European Institute. He coined the term polycrisis, is co-editor of Surplus magazine, and comments on political and economic developments on his substack chartbook.

TOPIC
Energy lies at the heart of today’s overlapping crises. Geopolitical conflicts, accelerating climate change, and deepening cost-of-living pressures are all shaped – and intensified – by the ways energy is produced, distributed, and governed. Far from being a merely technical domain, energy has become a central site of social conflict, political instability, and democratic risk.

At the same time, contemporary societies are under mounting pressure to undergo a far-reaching energy transition. For years, there has been broad agreement on its core objectives: decarbonizing energy production, expanding renewable generation, investing in grids and storage infrastructures, and improving sector coupling. Yet despite this apparent consensus, the transition continues to fall short. It remains too slow, too uneven, and too often reproduces existing social and ecological injustices. This conference starts from the premise that these shortcomings cannot be explained solely by a lack of political will or technological capacity. Rather, they are rooted in the organization of capitalist economies and states, as well as in the planning practices that currently structure energy systems.

Bringing together perspectives from political economy, political science, sociology, history, philosophy, critical theory, and ecological economics, the conference approaches energy planning as a key site of contradiction within contemporary capitalism: between economic growth and decarbonization, market coordination and public control, affordability and accumulation, stability and transformation. By examining the historical trajectories of energy governance, current forms of state planning, and emerging projects of socialization and energy democracy, the conference addresses these central questions: Who has historically planned and steered energy systems, and how has this changed over time?Who is steering them today? What material and institutional barriers obstruct transformative energy planning, and how might they be contested? How must energy systems be reorganized to enable an emancipatory social and ecological transition? And what would it mean to socialize energy?

Organized by: Solveig Degen, Jacob Blumenfeld, Rabea Berfelde