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The idea that we can 'save energy' has become a commonplace homily. But with a moment's reflection it is clear there is nothing self-evident about saving energy. Do we save fuel or a system's ability to 'do work'? Do we conserve for perpetuity or to prolong use? Is the motivation resource economy, scarcity, productivity, or - more recently - climate change mitigation? And what stops the fruits of individual parsimony being consumed elsewhere? This thesis offers a history of the idea that we can conserve energy by using it more efficiently. In recounting this story, it is argued that conserved energy is a 'metrological resource' produced by practices of measurement, calculation, and computation. A second argument is that the history of ERC offers an under examined example of a 'resource ontology'; the social processes through which nature is imbued with utility and value. Accordingly, the study of, what is termed, energy resource conservation (ERC herein) involved a novel research method which focused upon the scientific and intellectual processes of resource making, as much as the material. This thesis begins in 1865 with the publication of William Jevons' The Coal Question (1865), in which the resource conservative principles of Classical political economy were overturned. Jevons argued that increased efficiency of coal use would serve only to increase the rate and scale with which coal was used. Proceeding from this anti-thesis, the following chapters outline how, irrespective of Jevons' claim, policies based on the principles of scientific management were applied to the conservation of fuel resources for conserving natural resources. In pre-war America, a complex system of 'pro-rationing' extraction licenses were introduced to conserve the productive capacity of petroleum wells. However, a significant shift occurred during the Cold War, as the conservation of fuel became increasingly conflated with the econometrician's notion of efficient resource allocation. But the most significant developments occurred in the nineteen-seventies, in response to a perceived crisis in energy supply. Fuel policy became a more systemic 'energy policy', which drew on scientific management, graph theory, systems theory, statistical mechanics, and computational econometrics in an attempt to quantify and demonstrate how society could act to conserve energy resources by increasing the efficiency of energy use. The resulting science, and its concomitant policies were an odd mix of cold war rational decision making theories, détente science, scientific radicalism, and liberal economic theory, all given a countercultural and environmentalist gloss in the latter half of the decade. On the basis of this conflation of ideas, a new approach to energy saving that emerged, which transformed the principles of energy resource governance, shifting the onus to conserve from producer to consumer, with distinct implications for post-war theories of political economy.

This thesis follows the process of introducing natural gas in Sweden and the construction of a Northern European gas grid from 1967 to 1991. Natural gas is a relatively unnoticed fuel in Sweden today, but this relative anonymity stands in contrast to an extensive historical activity that has taken place behind the scenes of Swedish energy policy. The single pipeline constructed between Denmark and Sweden in the early 1980s was both preceded and followed by many other attempts to construct a larger natural gas pipeline in the region made in the last 50 years. Åberg traces these attempts while discussing the complex and messy process of constructing and managing a transnational energy infrastructure.Åberg follows actors in Sweden and other countries in their attempts to negotiate and construct a natural gas infrastructure, and puts this process into a national as well as transnational context. The perceived risks and opportunities surrounding natural gas are examined, together with factors that have influenced the development of natural gas in a broader sense. By seeing the changing and messy natural gas projects as arenas where different actors construct and negotiate risks and opportunities, as well as contexualize the projects, Åberg shows how the natural gas sector in Sweden has evolved and taken shape.The study shows that natural gas in Sweden has suffered from unstable actor coalitions on different levels, a difficult market situation, and a changeful political context, especially with regard to energy policy. The import status of the fuel and the consequential transnationality of the natural gas infrastructure have also made the process of constructing a pipeline more complex. However, natural gas was introduced in Sweden, showing that when a strong enough actor coalition agreed that there was enough reason to warrant a natural gas introduction and was ready to join this endeavor, a connection could be achieved. This puts into question to what degree general explanations in terms of finance and policy drive energy decisions, and makes a case for showing how these explanations are adapted into their social and historical contexts in sometimes surprising ways. / <p>QC 20130507</p> / The integration of energy markets across system and nation boundaries

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