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<p>Across the hillsides and outskirts of Jordan’s capital city, Amman, olive orchards and grazing lands are increasingly interspersed with glittering rows of photovoltaic (PV) panels that power solar wheeling systems. Wheeling systems are a legal–financial arrangement that enable commercial entities and community groups to build PV systems off-site and transport the electricity through the local distribution grid. While utility-scale solar plantations are increasingly critiqued for their negative impacts on land tenure and livelihood struggles, wheeling systems offer an alternative sociospatial configuration with the potential to provide greater land-use flexibility and meet specific community needs. Building from 16&#xa0;months of ethnographic research in Amman, this article asks how peri-urban land and property relations delimit the democratic and distributive potential of wheeled solar power. I argue that the evolution of wheeling arrangements reveals how the concentrated asymmetries of post-colonial property ownership play a constitutive role in coding emerging regimes of renewable energy accumulation. Using interviews, participant observation activities, and project planning documents, I show how the rapid proliferation of wheeling projects around Amman’s periphery has redirected flows of electricity and profit, creating a new mechanism of accumulation that reshapes broader urban and peri-urban land dynamics. Conflicts over siting, permitting, and the project approval process reveal the consequential ways that wheeling projects remake ideas of community and energy publics. In dialogue with emerging work at the intersection of energy geographies, political ecology, and post-colonial urbanism, this paper reveals the enduring legacies of post-colonial property relations and the ways that on-going struggles over land and livelihoods continue to shape the unfolding global solar turn.</p>

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Wheeling energy, wielding power: unsettling community in Jordan’s solar turn

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2025年2月17日

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  • Kendra Kintzi

摘要

Across the hillsides and outskirts of Jordan’s capital city, Amman, olive orchards and grazing lands are increasingly interspersed with glittering rows of photovoltaic (PV) panels that power solar wheeling systems. Wheeling systems are a legal–financial arrangement that enable commercial entities and community groups to build PV systems off-site and transport the electricity through the local distribution grid. While utility-scale solar plantations are increasingly critiqued for their negative impacts on land tenure and livelihood struggles, wheeling systems offer an alternative sociospatial configuration with the potential to provide greater land-use flexibility and meet specific community needs. Building from 16 months of ethnographic research in Amman, this article asks how peri-urban land and property relations delimit the democratic and distributive potential of wheeled solar power. I argue that the evolution of wheeling arrangements reveals how the concentrated asymmetries of post-colonial property ownership play a constitutive role in coding emerging regimes of renewable energy accumulation. Using interviews, participant observation activities, and project planning documents, I show how the rapid proliferation of wheeling projects around Amman’s periphery has redirected flows of electricity and profit, creating a new mechanism of accumulation that reshapes broader urban and peri-urban land dynamics. Conflicts over siting, permitting, and the project approval process reveal the consequential ways that wheeling projects remake ideas of community and energy publics. In dialogue with emerging work at the intersection of energy geographies, political ecology, and post-colonial urbanism, this paper reveals the enduring legacies of post-colonial property relations and the ways that on-going struggles over land and livelihoods continue to shape the unfolding global solar turn.