Solarpunk
Related terms: climate fiction, cyberpunk, science-fiction, speculative fiction
The sea hisses and then booms as it hits the rock shelf. A wall of white spray leaps hard into the air. The sun turns the foam into crystals, which rain down over the watching islander. Within the spray, a white carapace begins to rise from the sea. Barnacles encrust the curved surface. Saltwater pours down its limpet and metal sides. The islander smiles and reaches out a welcome. The curves form a… well, it depends on which solarpunk world I am writing.
In one world, this curved, barnacled surface forms the white nitrogen-filled cylinder of the island community’s data centre. Black cables slither ashore connecting it to the islander-owned wind turbine and hydrogen fuel cell, which keep it powered, keep it alive. The digital blacksmith, who visits the island from time to time, keeps an eye on how well their cloud servers are doing.
In another world, the curved white surface contains a bladed iris, a turbine that creates electricity from the tides. Its black cables also slither ashore to plug into the island’s electricity grid, to power islander homes, keep them warm, as well as keep the hydrogen fuel cell topped up.
Both worlds are solarpunk, for me, because they are possible clean energy futures that are self-determined. Solarpunk is about hope that is possible, about sustainable lives that can be lived, about stories that can take us there. The Solarpunk Manifesto says, “Solarpunk is at once a vision of the future, a thoughtful provocation, a way of living and a set of achievable proposals to get there” (The Solarpunk Community, n.d.).
Both worlds are based on my ethnographic and lived experience of Orkney, islands off the northeast coast of Scotland, where they generate over one hundred per cent of their electricity needs from their renewable energy (Watts 2019). It’s why Microsoft chose to test their underwater data centre in the islands (Cutler et al. 2018), which I saw rise from the ocean on the dockside. It’s why Mozilla visited and inspired islanders to imagine a digital blacksmith, a roving islander who turns up with the tools and expertise to fix everyday IT problems, from farm sensors to routers, just as a local blacksmith would have fixed things in the past (Watts 2018); and why companies from all over the world come here to test their tide energy turbines, plugging in to an island electricity substation with a hydrogen fuel system attached (EMEC 2025; BIGHIT 2024). Solarpunk is all about such local energy solutions: smart citizens trying to run their smart grids.
I wrote an evocative description to transport you there, because solarpunk is known for its age-of-sail aesthetic, for its science-fiction-as-activism, for its sunlit exuberance, and for kicking over the anthills (Flynn 2019). Solarpunk is not for defining. Writing a theoretical definition of solarpunk in a typical passive, academic writing style would not be solarpunk. You have to do it. Solarpunk is more verb than noun.
It has histories and origin myths, of course. The MS Beluga Skysails, a container cargo ship with sails, launched in 2007 en route to Venezuela and inspired the blog ‘Republic of the Bees’ to offer ‘solarpunk’ as an imaginative genre (Reina-Rozo 2021). The first published collection, Solarpunk – Histórias ecológicas e fantasticas em um mundo sustentável, featured short stories from nine Brazilian and Portuguese science fiction authors (Lodi-Ribeiro 2013). That was picked up by Wired magazine and on Tumblr, and so entered the wider internet world. But it retains its Latin and South orientation, committed to decolonising. Academics have dug into solarpunk’s roots, seeing connections with social justice, agroecology, green urbanism, the pluriverse, indigenous sovereignty, and jugaad innovation (Walther 2024; Wagner and Wieland 2022; Gillam 2023; Williams 2019).
But standing here, on a rock shelf at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, cold sea spray over my face, I can see a solarpunk data centre. Beneath its living skin of barnacles, the servers run open-source software and federated social media, powered by island-owned wind and tide turbines. Behind me, I can see black electricity cables hanging on wooden poles, through which fellow islanders sell their excess electricity to the grid and so make enough money to pay for their internet. The cables connect to the island’s warm and cosy homes, which they can afford because their Citizen Energy Community cooperative sets the tariff and the money goes round again (REScoop 2019); maybe you can even exchange your homegrown vegetables for homegrown energy; ‘tatties for ‘lectrons, as they say – ‘potatoes for electrons,’ in the local dialect. I can see all this in the salt spray as it leaps into the air, in the moments where the sun catches it, and a solarpunk world dances.
References
BIGHIT. 2024. “BIG HIT: Building Innovative Green Hydrogen Systems in Isolated Territories.” European Union Horizon 2020 Project. Last modified February 19, 2024.
Cutler, Ben, Spencer Fowers, Eric Petersen, and Mike Shepperd. 2018. “Project Natick.” Project Natick, Microsoft Research.
EMEC. 2025. ‘European Marine Energy Centre: Facilities’.
Flynn, Adam. 2019. “Solarpunk: Notes toward a Manifesto,” Project Hieroglyph (blog). Last modified June 24, 2019.
Gillam, William Joseph. 2023. “A Solarpunk Manifesto: Turning Imaginary into Reality.” Philosophies 8 (4): 73.
Lodi-Ribeiro, Gerson. 2013. Solarpunk. Histórias Ecológicas e Fantásticas em Um Mundo Sustentável. São Paulo: Draco.
Reina-Rozo, Juan David. 2021. “Art, Energy and Technology: The Solarpunk Movement.” International Journal of Engineering, Social Justice, and Peace 8 (1): 55-68.
REScoop. 2019. “Q&A: What Are Citizen and Renewable Energy Communities?” Last modified July 3, 2019.
The Solarpunk Community. n.d. “A Solarpunk Manifesto (English).” ReDes – Regenerative Design (blog), accessed March 19, 2025.
Wagner, Phoebe, and Brontë Christopher Wieland. 2022. Almanac for the Anthropocene: A Compendium of Solarpunk Futures. Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press.
Walther, David. 2024. “Solarpunk – Between Aesthetics and Activism.” Anglistik 35 (1): 163-81.
Watts, Laura, ed. 2018. “Orkney Cloud: Community-Led Data Services.” The Orkney Cloud Project / Mozilla.
Watts, Laura. 2019. Energy at the End of the World: An Orkney Islands Saga. Infrastructures. Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press.
Williams, Rhys. 2019. “‘This Shining Confluence of Magic and Technology’: Solarpunk, Energy Imaginaries, and the Infrastructures of Solarity.” Open Library of Humanities 5 (1).