Reading 1

• Ensuring the availability and accessibility of energy services in a carbon constrained world will require developing new ways of producing, living, and working with energy. Transition often captures change over time for a given geographical unit but overlooks changes in the wider organisation of the energy system and economics (Bridge, et al, 2013)
• The concept of energy transition is widely used within energy studies however has different meanings depending on location. For some in the global south, it means an increase in the availability and the affordability of modern energy services, sometimes with an increase in carbon intensity, however in other more wealthy countries, transition means a shift towards a low carbon future (Bridge, et al, 2013)
• Historical energy transitions have been associated with broader change, like the development and growth of industrialisation, urbanisation, and consumerism (Bridge, et al, 2013)
• Energy transition is heavily linked to geography – energy systems are located spatially and built around particular settings, and the network of the system produces geographies of connection, dependency, and control – for example at “bottlenecks” or “chokepoints” in international shipping of crude oil (Bridge, et al, 2013)
• Geographies of transition refer to the distribution of energy-related activities across a particular space (e.g. the UK) and the underlying processes that cause these patterns, and the geographical connections and interactions between that space and other spaces (e.g. the UK’s involvement in international agreements) (Bridge, et al, 2013)
• Location is both an absolute characteristic and a relative one – while an energy resource remains static in one place in absolute space, over time it grows relatively closer to others through the development of faster and more efficient infrastructure, and at the same time makes resources not connected to these systems relatively further away (Bridge, et al, 2013)
• The multi-level perspective has been critiqued as it does not consider space, place or geographical scale (Bridge et al 2013)
• Scale is the material size and extent of phenomena. It is an active process involving decision-making and policy (Bridge, et al 2013)
• Low carbon transitions will be experienced by many as the transformation of landscapes (Bridge et al 2013)