The Sun Also Rises in Portugal

Portugal has recently achieved a five-fold increase in solar capacity and its National Energy and Climate Plan has set an ambitious future target. This book considers whether this ambition will bear out in practice, and how social justice might be addressed, in a one-stop resource for policy makers, practitioners and scholars.

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This book addresses how a country with Europe’s best solar irradiation potential yet very low installed solar capacity of less than 0.5 gigawatt (GW) in 2017, went on to become the darling of Europe’s solar scene. By 2023, installed capacity has exceeded 2.5 GW, a five-fold increase within six years, but even more striking is the latest target of 20.4 GW by 2030 in Portugal’s National Energy and Climate Plan, up from the earlier target of 9 GW by 2027. These are large ambitions, and policymakers, practitioners, and scholars alike wonder: will these targets bear out in practice?
Drawing on long-term, multi-sited and multi-scalar ethnographic fieldwork, this book aims to address this concern. There is no comparable existing work that tells this story of Portugal, a case that has global significance as a laggard rather than a frontrunner and that is rapidly in the ascendancy.