Storifying SamsO's Renewable Energy Transition

Through a joint community effort Denmark's Renewable Energy Island SamsO became self-sufficient with renewable energy over a period of 10 years from 1997 to 2007. Today, the story about SamsO's successful energy transition has become a global export and a widely known model of community building, public participation and shared ownership in renewable energy technologies and transition processes. What has allowed the SamsO narrative to travel so widely has been the effective transition story' created about the islanders' efforts. This transition story, however, has become fixed with the years and has assumed an ideal-typical character. Meanwhile, the challenges and costs inherent in the complicated socio-material process of transition are underestimated and largely forgotten. While such transition stories are indeed inspiring, the ideal-typical narrative may stand in the way of the development of further local energy transitions, as challenging elements of the process are downplayed to strengthen the narrative power of the story. Ethnographic stories about SamsO complicate the island's transition narrative and add nuance to the SamsO story, highlighting its discrepancies and problematizing the effects of such well-crafted transition narratives. This tendency toward the storification' of transition processes is not restricted to SamsO; it is employed as a tactics by environmental organizations operating globally.