In the twenty‐first century, blackouts have settled into a familiar sequence of events in the fully electrified world. After jolting publics into a sudden awareness of energy assemblages, they gradually disappear from public memory. This article is an exercise in dwelling on blackouts that have already begun to recede from public memory so as to better conceptualize ‘energy security’ as an object of anthropological critique. Examining expert reports and retrospective verbal accounts, I focus on the 2021 blackout of Texas and the 2015 nationwide blackout of Turkey. Drawing on my long‐term ethnographic work with the US electric grid, I punctuate these failures with an uneventful day at a high‐security operation building in New England. I show that the desire for security suffuses electricity assemblages, from secure buildings of operation, to governments securing passage for the electric current, to publics demanding uninterrupted electricity access. I argue that in grid experts’ imagination, energy futures hinge on securing high‐risk nodes while continually expanding grids so that potential failures might be better absorbed. This imagination, however, produces a false sense of security when contemporary threats to transmission are too wide‐ranging to isolate and will only be amplified by larger grids.

中文翻译：

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坚持停电：不安全的能源人类学


在二十一世纪，停电已成为完全电气化世界中常见的一系列事件。在让公众突然意识到能源组合之后，它们逐渐从公众记忆中消失。本文旨在探讨已经开始从公众记忆中消失的停电事件，以便更好地将“能源安全”概念化为人类学批判的对象。通过审查专家报告和回顾性口头叙述，我重点关注 2021 年德克萨斯州停电和 2015 年土耳其全国停电。借鉴我在美国电网的长期人种学工作，我在新英格兰一座高度安全的运营大楼里度过了平安无事的一天，以强调这些失败。我表明，对安全的渴望弥漫在电力机构中，从安全的运营建筑，到确保电流通道的政府，再到要求不间断供电的公众。我认为，在电网专家的想象中，能源未来取决于确保高风险节点的安全，同时不断扩大电网，以便更好地吸收潜在的故障。然而，当当代传输威胁范围太广而无法隔离并且只会被更大的电网放大时，这种想象会产生一种错误的安全感。