A Small Window: The Opportunities for Renewable Energies from Shock to Counter-Shock

This chapter reviews the main works by intellectuals and scientists as well as the official discourses on future energy scenarios made at government level in the 1970s and early 1980s, with an emphasis on how these were crystallised in official multilateral forums. As is shown in the first section, the generalised talk of ,energy transition, in the 1970s and early 1980s did open a window of opportunity for renewable energies worldwide. But the actual size of that window appears to have always been relatively small, both in the public debate and in the scenarios depicted by public authorities, as is shown in the second and third sections respectively. Furthermore, as shown in the fourth section, a close analysis reveals that the support for renewable energies – just like that for the more general concept of ,energy transition, – was often founded on the fear of an imminent exhaustion of oil reserves, which was easily disproved by the ,oil glut, of the early 1980s. As the concluding section summarises, the counter-shock did close the window. But the clash between fossil fuels and renewables had never really been a titanic one and, to the extent that renewables had been promoted as part of the solution to a false problem, it is not surprising that interest in them declined for a while, once the misunderstanding became clear.