Staying with the blackout: an insecure anthropology of energy

In the twenty-first century, blackouts have settled into a familiar sequence of events in the fully electrified world. After jolting publics into a sudden awareness of energy assemblages, they gradually disappear from public memory. This article is an exercise in dwelling on blackouts that have already begun to recede from public memory so as to better conceptualize ‘energy security’ as an object of anthropological critique. Examining expert reports and retrospective verbal accounts, I focus on the 2021 blackout of Texas and the 2015 nationwide blackout of Turkey. Drawing on my long-term ethnographic work with the US electric grid, I punctuate these failures with an uneventful day at a high-security operation building in New England. I show that the desire for security suffuses electricity assemblages, from secure buildings of operation, to governments securing passage for the electric current, to publics demanding uninterrupted electricity access. I argue that in grid experts’ imagination, energy futures hinge on securing high-risk nodes while continually expanding grids so that potential failures might be better absorbed. This imagination, however, produces a false sense of security when contemporary threats to transmission are too wide-ranging to isolate and will only be amplified by larger grids.