Power Struggle

Abstract

The project collects past, present, and future stories of energy in, around, and through Gibraltar: fuel economies in the age of Franco; the refueling of middle eastern tankers; the transition from diesel to LNG fuel sources; the additional load of bedroom bit-coin miners, to industrial scale server farms; the interception of fuel tankers bound of middle eastern war zones; the design of new power stations; the laying of new power cables between Europe and north Africa; new forms of decentralized energy sources and the impact of energy migrants crossing the Mediterranean. The stories speak both of the internal and local logics of Gibraltar, and of its role within international networks: the alliances, arrangements, and compromises it makes to ‘keep the power switched on’ and remain a feasible territory; the economical and infrastructural side-effects of energy networks that pass around and through the straits and the peninsula. The project describes how these networks manifest themselves in infrastructure, buildings, and spaces: cables, landing stations, and maintenance rooms; docks, re-fueling stations, and dormitories; LNG trading routes, power stations, control rooms; data networks, underground storage tunnels, bedrooms. It does so in order to tell new stories about Gibraltar; not as a provincial cul-de-sac out of time, but as a node and a conduit in one of the key Geo-strategic locations in the Mediterranean.  This is a location of increasing importance in the decades of climate emergency, as Europe turns towards north Africa for new sources of energy, as climate migrants line the Mediterranean coastline, as shipping and trade transforms.