In this piece, we consider unbuilding as a practice of restoring balance. At first glance, infrastructures usually appear to materialize equilibrium, holding themselves together by the deployment of physical forces that prevent them tipping, tumbling, or exploding. As is often noted, infrastructure’s practical invisibility is premised on its ability not to break down or fall apart.

However, achieving internal balance often comes at the expense of a much more unstable set of external relations (or externalities) which manifest as dynamics of exploitation, pollution, inequality, and protest. Recent attempts to shift attention from the seemingly coherent object of infrastructure to attend to a more unruly ecology of infrastructure reveal infrastructure’s entanglement with broader systematic imbalances—of climate, economy, and culture (Lea 2020). This has triggered efforts to resolve these broader imbalances through acts of infrastructural unbuilding.

Here, we explore one example of unbuilding in response to disequilibrium generated by the (neo)liberalized electricity infrastructure in the United Kingdom. Over the past decade, a small but committed network of people has emerged across the United Kingdom around the promise of community-based energy generation, conservation, and supply. Participants in this network of community energy groups have articulated their work as a method of repairing fundamental imbalances in contemporary environmental, social, and economic relations. Starting out with climate-focused community groups installing small solar arrays or water turbines in often rural areas, community energy has expanded into urban settings where questions of local energy independence intersect with broader issues of economic and social injustice.

While community energy was initially driven by concerns about climate change, recent geopolitical events have expanded the focus of its practitioners. The social and economic imbalances of the current energy system were highlighted in 2022 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which triggered an energy price hike. While, ironically, this allowed community energy organizations to receive higher revenue for the energy they were generating, many households in the communities served by local energy projects were struggling to pay their bills.

Community energy practitioners working in urban areas and low-income communities in particular have responded by exploring alternative ways of generating, distributing, and supplying energy, with a view to tackling not only climate change but also the economic imbalances of the current system. One focus of this work has been the question of who has control and ownership over the means of energy production. The increased availability and decreased cost of solar panels have helped create a sense of energy’s ubiquitous “environmentality” (Gabrys 2014), its abundance, and hence its democratizing potential. The increased availability of rooftop solar energy opens up the possibility that those states or corporations who have historically dominated fossil fuel deposits will no longer be able to control energy. Instead, anyone should be able to access the power of the sun; as one member of an energy forum noted, “Our sun has just 5 billion years of energy left … get yours whilst you can!”

A second focus of critique has been the accumulation of profits in the face of deprivation. At the same time as energy generation companies have reaped huge profits, a decade of austerity policies has drained resources from impoverished councils and communities across the United Kingdom. If people in these communities are spending increased amounts of money on energy in order to live, work, and travel, then keeping that money within a local area might have social as well as environmental benefits. If energy could be saved, generated, and exchanged locally, then could it not offer a powerful mechanism of economic renewal (Brown and Jones 2021)?

Two imbalances, then—of institutional control over the energy commons, and of excess accumulation in the face of poverty—have served to galvanize experiments seeking to unbuild the current system and rebuild it from the ground up according to principles of social and ecological justice (a concept that itself of course implies the achievement of balance).

Unbuilding imbalance in the electricity system is not easy, not least because it requires working within the existing physical equilibrium upon which electricity infrastructures depend. Electricity grids not only operate within an epistemological aesthetic of balance (Poovey 1998), they also depend on the materialization of balance between electricity entering the network (supply) and electricity being used (demand). For this reason, a community energy installation of over 1MW of power cannot simply be added onto the grid. An application has to be made to the district network operator so that grid companies can factor such change into network upgrades and avoid excesses in power generation. Whilst this can be frustrating for community energy applicants who might have to wait years for a grid connection, it also produces opportunities for those willing and able to install batteries that enable them to buy excess electricity from the grid at peak times and sell it back when it is needed.

The question of how best to address imbalance has demanded a creative and extensive rethinking of energy. This has led some community energy groups to move beyond energy generation and storage, and engage in providing people with energy advice to help them reduce bills, becoming involved in research projects, or exploring opportunities for housing retrofit—a method of unbuilding old homes that were built in a different energy context, and repurposing them to be more energy efficient and cheaper to run.

Through these projects, community energy groups are not only building new energy infrastructure, but also attempting to unbuild a contemporary energy system that achieved its own balance by externalizing and thus hiding its inherent imbalances. Unbuilding existing infrastructure is not straightforward when it has to grapple with the materialization of balance as a necessary precondition for such infrastructures to function. At the same time, the intractability of the problem demands new ways of conceiving of infrastructural relations, unbuilding infrastructures as we know them, and coming up with alternative social-material arrangements that fundamentally reconfigure the very expectations of what an infrastructure is, who it is for, and how it should be arranged.