Energy and motion,resource and value,geography and space–time?

Ptak et al. (2025) define energy geographies as those studies that ‘critically analyze, evaluate and comprehensively investigate relationships coupling energy and space’. But what is meant by energy; and is geography only about space? Unsatisfied with the physics-informed definition of energy as the ability to do work, Ptak et al. (2025) collate from a range of scholars an extensive array of unexclusive – albeit fascinating – characterizations of what energy is: ‘capital accumulation through (neo)colonial dispossession, value-making potentialities through waste-making propensities, affluence and access in excess afforded through ecocide and genocide … the lifeblood of capitalism … the ourobouros of the Anthropocene’. The authors concede – or perhaps insist – that ‘energy is everything, everywhere, all at once’.

Toward energy as an analytical concept

If energy is to be found in anything, anywhere and anytime, studies of it could become equally boundless. An agenda for the subdiscipline is clear insofar as it interrogates relations between energy and space; at the same time, energy is taken to be practically anything. As a result, energy geographies could be practically anything as well. Understandably, the main point of Ptak et al.’s (2025) paper was not to provide a definition of energy. But along with the pathways they lay out – encouraging scholars to self-identify with the subdiscipline; deepening theoretical engagements and foundations; and building institutional networks to strengthen the academic community (11–13) – greater clarity on what energy means could only support energy geographies’ move toward centre stage in human geography.

Instead of asking what energy is, or what energy encompasses, I suggest that what may be crucial is what the authors mean when they argue ‘energy is curiously perceived inversely – an object of concern rather than a field of study’ (Ptak et al., 2025: 2). In other terms, it is the difference between energy as ‘an analytical concept’, as opposed to ‘an empirical object of analysis’ (Huber, 2015: 3). Revisiting past debates on the differences between resources and energy is key to unpacking this distinction, for it is under the banner of resource geography and political ecology that Ptak et al. (2025: 11) contend much of energy geographies research has fallen under. Are resources and energy equivalent terms? Or do they overlap, and if so, where and how do they differ?

Earth ‘becomes’ resource when it is of value or utility (Huber, 2018), thus ‘tell[ing] us rather more about a society than … about the substance itself’ (Bridge, 2009: 1220). As both Huber (2015) and Cederlöf (2021) have argued, political ecology, concerned chiefly with ‘the conflicts and struggles engendered by the forms of access to and control over resources’ (Peluso and Watts, 2001: 25) made energy an empirical object of analysis that fit under studies that took resource as their analytical concept. In part, the resource-oriented view was a counter to another methodological approach known as cultural ecology, which eschewed political considerations and instead understood the ways nature and human societies related to each other as chiefly flows of energy and nutrients (Huber, 2015: 3). While using resource as an analytical concept was powerful in exposing how the reworking of earth fit into larger global political economic systems, it was limiting in other ways. In this mode of analysis, what was key was the moment of extraction whereby the earth ‘becomes’ resource. The scope for studies on stock subterranean fossil fuels, for instance, tended to be spatially concentrated around the ‘holes’ where actors and technologies conglomerate to excavate fossil fuel wealth from within the earth (Bridge, 2009; Huber, 2015).

Ptak et al. (2025) insist that energy is much more than just the resource at its point of extraction; that it has many afterlives of its own – stored in barrels, flowing through pipelines, and coursing through electricity wires in a chain of transformations of form and accretions of value. The choice of which resource to extract is mediated by this complex nexus of social relations governing its downstream production and use (Malm, 2016; Mitchell, 2013). But resources and energies intertwine in ways that are not quite so easily extricated in such a chronological ‘lifecycle analysis’. Modern use of renewable energy – specifically that which converts kinetic and radiant energy into electricity – relies on technologies – wind turbines and solar panels – that require not ‘holes’ but dispersed arrangements, ‘elevat[ing] land as the centre of energy struggles’ (Huber and McCarthy, 2017: 666). But is this not a projection of the terranean implications of technologies and not the qualities of the atmosphere itself, arguably the ‘primary resource’? Instead of asking a question about categories – is it energy or is it resource – is the better question to ask, what does the analytical concept of energy bring that is different from that of resources?

Energy and motion, not (just) value

Much of the research that Ptak et al. (2025) argue should be considered energy geographies views energy fundamentally as something to control, extract, and profit from. Energy and resources are often used interchangeably in this line of reasoning, equating ‘geography of energy’ with the ‘wealth of the world’ (Pasqualetti, 2011). Perhaps energy can offer something novel, distinct, and complementary to resources, by embracing what energy originally sought to describe. Before energy was formalised as a mathematical unit to describe work, or force applied over distance, antecedent uses of the word were also semantically linked to dynamism, motion, and potentials for action (Daggett, 2019: 17). Histories of science trace attempts to explain motion in mathematical terms, culminating in early 20th-century thermodynamics that sought to measure heat released from the combustion of fuel (Daggett, 2019).

Our contemporary understanding of energy has become a different sort of ‘universal currency’ (Smil, 2018: 1) – the mathematically backed unit of analysis to describe that which makes all things move. This ‘universal currency’ describes the physical quality of some materiality's potential to generate motion. A materiality's value, denominated in price, derives from this property, which is combined with other metrics to make relative comparisons of efficiency. It is this derivative layer of value that a resource-oriented view considers key and fundamental, but then tends to disregard the thermodynamics of what the value is based upon – the forces that generate motion. Resource and energy geographies need not be cast as competing subdisciplines, but rather as distinct views of earth reconfigured by social relations: while resource immediately focuses on questions of value and extraction, energy engages with the core physical mechanics of how motion works and how they undergird nature–society relations. Embracing this analytical concept of energy opens up an opportunity to reengage with debates on geographical theories of space–time (Harvey, 1990; Massey, 1999; Merriman, 2012). Energy's theoretical contributions to geography should not be limited to spatial concepts (Bridge, 2018; Bridge et al., 2013) but also extend to theories of motion and rhythmicity (Cederlöf, 2024: 3). As Cederlöf has articulated, this analytical mode of inquiry takes energy as ‘a materiality with thermodynamic properties that moves through economies and societies in physically and socially uneven ways’ (Cederlöf, 2021: 71) and further understands ‘entropy, time, and space … as imbricated phenomena’ (Cederlöf, 2024: 2).

The renewable energy transition presents a prime opportunity to engage with energy as relational thermodynamic materiality rather than an object to control and access. Energy from the atmosphere raises questions about how the temporal relates to the spatial – not necessarily in the historical sense (situating energy studies within a historical context), but in a dynamic, real-time sense (the continuously changing magnitudes of energy in volumetric space). Wind and sunlight are spatiotemporally intermittent and, most crucially, cannot be harnessed, stored, and controlled. They are highly exposed to, or let us say one with, the weather. Subterranean stock hydrocarbons, by contrast, allow for the control of time, of when and where the fuel can be converted to useful work. Hydropower might fall somewhere in the middle, allowing for partial control of when kinetic energy is converted to electricity while also being dependent on rainfall and other meteorological conditions. Yet most human geography research on renewable energy focuses on the technologies and the infrastructures, which tends to take a resource-oriented approach. A burgeoning critical scholarship, for example, examines renewable energy infrastructures’ terranean manifestations of extractivism, whether in the form of land-grabbing (Alonso Serna, 2022; Dunlap, 2020; Scheidel and Sorman, 2012; Stock and Birkenholtz, 2021; Yenneti et al., 2016) or rare earth minerals mining (Dunlap, 2021; Golroudbary et al., 2022). Without detracting from these important advances, exploring the spatiotemporal materialities of intermittent energy within the atmosphere could raise instead questions about how to use energy exposed to the vagaries of the weather, the limits of control, and the role meteorology has to play (Groupp, 2025). This approach could better connect to and advance theories of space and time in geography that offer a different angle from studies that focus primarily on the renewable energy industry and its terranean technology infrastructures.

Conclusion

In this commentary, I have elaborated on the implications for energy geographies that would constitute a distinct analytical concept, rather than an object of study. Resources and energy constitute different conceptual angles that consider the implications of value and utility on the one hand and motion on the other. In reality, the difference may not be so clearcut. Still, marking out these ontological distinctions may be helpful as an analytical tool. By deepening its engagement with thermodynamic materiality and the relations of space and time, energy geographies could develop a unique analytical perspective that complements yet remains distinct from resource geographies, and could illuminate a different form of nature–society relations that does not immediately focus on points or planes of extraction but rather on the volumetrically heterogeneous magnitudes of forces that create motion, that undergird the way humans relate to and interact with earth's potentials. This approach could help realise Ptak et al.’s (2025) call for the subdiscipline of energy geographies to move away from the margins to the centre of the discipline of human geography.