Energy gentrification
Manuel García Domínguez
Gentrification, from the English word ‘gentry’ (meaning ‘small aristocracy’, ‘upper middle class’ or ‘respectable family’), is a widely used concept in discussions about the housing crisis. It describes an urban process of elitisation and occupation of a territory that leads to a generalised increase in land prices and the consequent displacement of low-income residents. Ultimately, it is a competition for space that, when developed through market mechanisms, favours the population with the highest incomes, displacing other social groups to other territories (Sabatini et al., 2009).
However, according to authors such as Eric Clark (2005), the concept of gentrification could encompass other areas beyond urban processes. Specifically, Clark extends the term to include any process that displaces people due to the influx of corporate capital. If we decide to reserve the term ‘gentrification’ to describe urban gentrification, we will need to coin adjectives to describe the other phenomena. It is at this point that the notion of ‘energy gentrification’ emerges.
Energy gentrification describes the displacement of users of the electricity grid due to the hoarding of electricity production and distribution infrastructure by electrointensive industries. According to Libertson et al. (2021), “energy gentrification replaces competition for land and housing with competition for energy, and the demographics of different socio-economic groups with those of network users” (p. 157). There are two types of energy gentrification: weak and strong.
The weak version arises when an increase in electricity demand raises the proportion of fossil fuels in the energy mix, resulting in an increase in the energy supply bill. This increase is greater if public investment is required to reinforce the electrical infrastructure or if the electro-intensive project signs power purchase agreements (PPAs) with energy companies, reserving a quantity of renewable energy at a fixed price. Strong gentrification occurs when a heavy industry’s access to the electricity grid monopolises the grid’s transport capacity or energy availability. In these cases, these companies would ‘fill’ the electrical infrastructure, effectively preventing the incorporation of other users. In both cases, whether due to the unaffordability of the project —weak version— or the deficit in the network’s capacity to provide access to new projects —strong version—, the introduction of electro-intensive industries can displace other users of the electrical network. Furthermore, this displacement may be spatial if the user decides to install themselves in another territory, or temporal if they postpone the project in anticipation of an expansion of the electrical grid.
According to Libertson et al. (2021, p. 158), ‘the notion of energy gentrification is useful for investigating the ethical dimensions of prioritisation between new establishments and infrastructure projects’. Urban gentrification has sparked a wide-ranging debate about the social functions that housing should fulfil. Typically, the dialogue oscillates between residential use and speculative or financial use, as well as the role of state regulation in determining one or the other use. Similarly, energy gentrification opens up a debate about the uses of electrical infrastructure that should be prioritised in scenarios where demand exceeds supply and there is a plurality of stakeholders.
This debate is particularly relevant in territories experiencing a dual process: the electrification of the economy accompanying the energy transition (see Renewable Energies and Ecosocial Transition) and the accelerated installation of hyperscale data centres dedicated to supporting the functioning of artificial intelligence or the Internet of Things, which accompanies the emergence of frontier technologies (Monstadt and Saltzman, 2025; Velkova, 2025). Data centres, as an example of an electrointensive industry, compete with projects associated with decarbonisation for the same energy resources. These include transport projects such as the construction of new railway lines, the electrification of public transport or the charging of electric boats at docks, as well as industrial projects such as the construction of a green hydrogen plant, the expansion of a glass factory or the use of industrial heat pumps for the production of hot water and steam. This creates three recurring conflicts that affect other electrointensive industries.
Firstly, the various projects that request access to the electricity network do not compete on the same terms. This is particularly the case when a multinational corporation enters into competition with a local project. In these cases, the voice of the local population tends to be marginalised and regulations favourable to major economic agents, such as investment funds or technology multinationals, are established. Often, the companies that manage these projects are large energy companies that seek to provide a more profitable exit for their current energy production projects. In this way, they exploit the network of legal knowledge, contacts and infrastructure established during the construction of renewable energy parks and thermal power stations to gain a privileged position in the installation of new industries, this time centred on energy demand (Jiménez and García, 2026).
Secondly, this conflict with the local population is justified by the promise of regional development and economic growth, citing the fiscal contribution and job creation (Ortar et al., 2024). This discourse is not only false in industries such as data centres, given the tax exemptions and low employment creation rates, but it also often reproduces the narrative of terra nullius, according to which electrointensive projects would be installed on empty land and would not displace projects in other spaces (Gómez, 2026). This discourse is used to justify the installation of hyperscale data centres in economically depressed rural areas of Spain, specifically in the so-called ‘deserted Spain’. Regions such as Extremadura and Aragon are devaluing their history, ecosystems and economic potential to allow the occupation of tens of thousands of hectares with data centres, as well as renewable energy parks that reproduce their image of sustainable industry.
Thirdly, governments that host these projects overestimate the benefits and underestimate the public spending on electrical infrastructure. Public investment in expanding the electrical network (and other resources, such as the water network or transport infrastructure) necessary for the installation of the project shifts control of public assets to private entities. In this way, ‘gentrification is often a manifestation of the conflict between global and local capital, i.e. a process in which international interests monetise local assets at the expense of the local economy’ (Libertson et al., 2021). Furthermore, energy-extractive industries often have consequences that extend beyond their impact on the electrical grid. For example, the production of this energy requires large quantities of water and/or fossil fuels in thermal, nuclear and hydroelectric power stations. Furthermore, in the case of data centres, energy is dissipated in the form of heat, which usually requires water for cooling and emits heat and noise from the fans. The consumption of scarce resources in the environment and the deterioration of living conditions for humans and non-humans in the surrounding ecosystems can exacerbate territorial conflicts, giving rise to processes such as water gentrification or urban gentrification.
Energy gentrification is therefore directly linked to other types of gentrification. The occupation of electrical infrastructure by electrointensive projects puts local projects in a difficult position. On the one hand, the need to reduce emissions to keep the planet habitable, as well as the increase in the price of fossil fuels, establishes electrification as an ecological and economic survival imperative. On the other hand, this imperative is confronted with the material impossibility of accessing and connecting to the electrical grid. This dilemma may, in the worst case, be resolved by the closure or relocation of industries to other territories, resulting in job losses and the loss of local wealth. At the same time, a lack of job opportunities can lead to emigration from the municipality, which can be understood, in a broad sense, as displacement due to the influx of corporate capital and, consequently, gentrification.
Currently, there are mainly two groups of measures to prevent energy gentrification and, more broadly, the monopolisation of network resources. The first group does not locate the problem in the industrial network, but in the economic injustices that it generates. In this sense, measures such as requiring electrointensive industries to cover the costs of expanding the electricity grid, imposing the incorporation of renewable energy parks in the form of self-consumption, or demanding a higher tax rate for the public maintenance of the electrical infrastructure are demanded. The second group, on the other hand, calls for a transformation of the scale and ownership regime to align with the energy transition. Therefore, its measures point towards democratic and ecological planning of industries that connect to the electrical grid, a total or partial moratorium on some electrointensive industries while the energy transition takes hold, and the construction of a public-community network of industries that allows for democratic control of the most extractive uses of energy resources (see Energy Sovereignty). In any case, they should not be understood as incompatible proposals, but rather as complementary strategies to adapt to and mitigate the conflicts generated by energy gentrification.
Ultimately, energy gentrification reveals one of the conflicts associated with the decarbonisation of a growing economy: the emergence or expansion of energy-intensive industries whose regional development promises are prioritised over the government’s climate commitments. In these scenarios, emission reduction ceases to be the fundamental driver of electrification, and the same public efforts dedicated to the energy transition, such as expanding the electrical grid or installing renewable energy parks, are privatised for the benefit of the promoters of these industries. In this way, the wind turbine or the photovoltaic panel would cease to be the standard for transitioning to societies that are more socially and environmentally just, becoming instead the condition for cheap energy that makes large industrial projects profitable and legitimate in the hands of large private corporations. Energy gentrification processes thus reflect the etymology with which this entry began: the allocation of energy resources to the small aristocracy or upper bourgeoisie, with the consequent displacement of other agents with lower incomes and, we add, the expulsion of the social metabolism outside the planetary limits.
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