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Floating Power

Energy, Infrastructure, and South-South Relations

Cover of Floating Power is a solid navy blue with a line drawing resembling a ship in white. The line drawing also features a plug.

Experimental Futures: Technological Lives, Scientific Arts, Anthropological Voices

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Book

Pages: 194

Illustrations: 22 illustrations

Release Date: April 21, 2026

Author: Gökçe Günel

Floating Power considers the role of energy production on an international scale, challenging the idea that new infrastructures wholly replace older sources of energy. Shifting the discussion from energy transition to energy accumulation, Gökçe Günel engages with a range of electricity producers including hydroelectric, heavy fuel oil, natural gas, and solar power plants, noting their intersections as societies work to expand their supply at large rather than focus on one type of source. Günel uses the Ayşegül Sultan, a Turkish-built floating power plant in Ghana, as a prime example and vehicle to explore how state and corporate intervention impact energy technologies as every nation strives toward infrastructural expansion. Floating Power challenges the linear thinking and substitutive logic of mainstream energy discourse, instead showing how various power sources often expand and grow symbiotically.

Praise

“This masterful ethnography of Ghana’s floating power plants challenges the very categories through which we apprehend the material world. It dissolves boundaries between the fixed and the flexible, the infrastructural and the ephemeral, the old and the new. In doing so, it reveals the paradoxes of sustaining power amid uncertainty and the deferrals of modernity.” - Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, author of More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy

“This quirky-smart book about a floating Turkish ‘powership’ off the West African coast disrupts multiple narratives: teleological stories about energy futures, racist renderings of Africa as ‘always behind,’ ethical-political worries about the intersection of business and politics, methodological fretting about immersive versus patchwork ethnography. A singular and original contribution to scholarship on South-South affiliations and alliances today.” - Charles Piot, author of The Fixer: Visa Lottery Chronicles

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Author/Editor Bios Table Of Contents Rights Additional Information Funding Information

Author/Editor Bios

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Gökçe Günel is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rice University. She is the author of Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi, published by Duke University Press, and co-author of Patchwork Ethnography.

Table Of Contents

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Introduction: Technologies of Deferral  1
1. Cin Fikir  31
2. Liminal Devices  60
3. Leapfrogging to Solar  86
4. Drive Electric  110
Epilogue: A Global Future of Energy  137
Acknowledgments  145
Notes  149
References  163
Index  179

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Sales/Territorial Rights: World

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Additional Information

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Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-3851-1 / Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4780-3361-5 / eISBN: 978-1-4780-6211-0 / DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478062110

Funding Information

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This book is published in an open access edition and released on University Press Library Open (UPLOpen.com) as part of the ‘UPLOpen Climate Change Collection.’ UPLOpen is an initiative of Paradigm Publishing and the De Gruyter eBound Foundation.