Abstract

In 2018, a powerful earthquake caused a blackout in the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido that made energy infrastructure and resilience become public problems in Japan once again. In this article, I will explore differing ideas and practices of resilience by the government, biogas producers and researchers. Moreover, I will contrast the way the government locates resilience in grid infrastructure as opposed to biogas producers’ creation of local heatbased infrastructures involving cows, plants and bacteria. Drawing on the anthropology of energy, I argue that the affective and infrastructural dimensions of biogas experiments are not a revolutionary alternative, but offer the possibility of a more grounded and multispecies politics of energy.