New Sites of Accumulation? Why Intangible Assets Matter for Energy Transitions

Silvia Weko

Review of Political Economy, 2025, vol. 37, issue 4, 1571-1598

Abstract: Energy transitions break geographic monopolies on fossil fuel resources and are expected to redistribute economic benefits to new actors, from local communities to developing countries. At the same time, basing energy systems around renewables increases the importance of intangible assets such as data and artificial intelligence (AI). As different IPE approaches have shown, such intangibles can be monopolized by lead firms and especially Big Tech, which increasingly provide crucial digital infrastructures. This paper therefore asks what role Big Tech firms may play in energy systems, and whether their access to intangibles enables them to expand to the energy sector. The case study of Amazon illustrates that data-driven intellectual monopolies are well-positioned to expand into energy, benefitting from their position as providers of data infrastructures, and capacities in data harvesting and analysis. Amazon is both developing and marketing its own innovations, and investing in energy systems businesses. As intangibles gain importance in energy systems, possible implications for the IPE of energy include power and economic value flowing towards Big Tech, rather than countries or communities.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09538259.2024.2391304 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:revpoe:v:37:y:2025:i:4:p:1571-1598

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CRPE20

DOI: 10.1080/09538259.2024.2391304

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Political Economy is currently edited by Sylvio Kappes, Maria Cristina Barbieri Goes and Louis-Philippe Rochon

More articles in Review of Political Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().