Grassroots energy transformations. A repairable and decentralized storage technology in Northern Uganda.

Abstract (English)

In the city of Gulu and its rural surrounding area, in a post-conflict context of great distributive inequality (Cross, 2019), for decades, batteries have been forcefully and quietly “invading” urban space as a means of domestic energy reproduction. In particular, from the 1990s until today, when car batteries no longer start the vehicle, they are taken and reused at home for lighting or leisure activities, and in their wanderings, they have enabled the emergence of a local economic network (collection, reuse, informal re-selling, recycling) that supply electricity to middle- and low-income residents.
These storage devices do not only accumulate energy, but also political imaginaries of a “forced” energy transition and everyday discursive spaces with respect to the “hidden forms of ontological and epistemological violence” of the Ugandan state towards the Acholi population and its natural resources (Tornel, 2023: 53). Moreover, the reuse, maintenance, and repairability of second-hand lead-acid batteries reclaims a relational understanding of energy, entangled in daily and precarious ties between people and matter (Lennon, 2017). These storage technologies remain at the service of frugal and sufficiency practices, oriented towards the reproduction of the means of subsistence typical of the local lifestyles of the low-income majority.
While the case study does not include the description of a real R.E.C., the case of Gulu’s off-grid urbanism and the reuse economy that revolves around it can help to reflect on those daily energy practices, enabled by a decentralized and repairable storage technology, that challenge the logic of “maximum energy production” of modern energy systems and the hegemonic discourses on energy transition based on a problematic lithium-ion future and ever-increasing electrified consumption (Lohmann, 2013: 58).