Floating power plants: How colonial energy models repeat failures in climate-vulnerable coastal zones
Original framing: “Floating power plants could offer coastal communities a reliable energy source. Here’s how” — The Conversation - Global
Marginalized voices in coastal communities—particularly women, youth, and Dalit castes in South Asia—are systematically excluded from energy decision-making, despite bearing the brunt of environmental and social harms. For example, women in Bangladesh’s Sundarbans region, who rely on mangroves for food and medicine, have protested floating solar projects that threaten these ecosystems, yet their testimonies are absent from policy debates. Similarly, in the Philippines, Indigenous Lumad communities have been displaced by 'renewable energy' projects that prioritize corporate land grabs over local needs. The framing of floating power plants as 'neutral' solutions obscures these power dynamics, treating communities as passive beneficiaries rather than active stakeholders—a pattern that repeats across global energy transitions.
The floating power plant narrative is a classic example of how climate adaptation is co-opted to extend the life of extractive energy systems, repackaging colonial logics as 'innovation.
' The omission of Indigenous energy sovereignty models—such as those in Aotearoa or the Arctic—reveals a deeper pattern: Western institutions treat coastal communities as laboratories for unproven technologies, while historical precedents (from Fukushima to the Aswan Dam) show that these experiments rarely serve the people they claim to help. The trickster dimension exposes the absurdity of framing floating plants as 'lifelines' when they are often tied to carbon markets that allow polluters to offload responsibility onto the Global South. Solution pathways must center community ownership, reparations for past harms, and legal frameworks that treat energy as a cultural right—not a corporate commodity. Without this shift, floating power plants will merely replicate the failures of the past, drowning in the same structural currents they pretend to navigate.