In 2020, the Danish government proposed in a climate agreement to build the world’s first energiøer or ‘energy islands’ in the North Sea, or offshore wind energy hub prototypes. Due to the energy crisis that exploded in Europe since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, there has been a rhetorical turn from wind energy’s “abundance” towards offshore wind energy production, including energy islands, as urgent securitizing solution to replace Russian coal, oil and gas.

This talk focuses on the figure of the ‘energy island’ as a speculative model and as an international and regional imaginary of environmental/energy futures from an environmental media perspective. It first examines the Danish ‘energy island’ as a proposition of potential Power-to-X/ green hydrogen capacities to be completed by 2030. I explain the speculative qualities that build upon Denmark’s existing globally oriented wind energy industry infrastructural apparatus through an analysis of energy-island related discourse and observations from Østerild Wind Turbine Center. I then contextualize the Danish ‘energy island’ within a broader discourse on ‘energy islands’ and other energy platforms in Europe which reflect a landscape of grid hyperconnectivity as well as the tension between anticipated middle to long-term ‘green hydrogen’ futures and the securitizing use of sources such as natural gas. Much like how wind is mediated into legible and stable entities through infrastructural apparatuses to become a global extractable and valuable power resource, speculative environmental futures are being ‘grounded’ in these projected ‘energy islands’.  This ‘grounding’ is based upon the projection of metonymic part-whole associations, as well as in infrastructural and terrestrial imaginaries that enable the simultaneous projection and displacement of spatial boundaries and geographical situatedness.

Coffee, tea, cake and fruit will be served before the colloquium @ 2 pm.