Infra-circuits of fossil capital and Technosphere: More-than-human politics of the Samcheok thermal power plant

In May 2024, Samcheok Blue Power Unit 1, a coal-fired thermal power plant in Samcheok, Gangwon Province, South Korea, began commercial operation. Together with Unit 1 (completed in October 2023) and Unit 2 (scheduled for completion by the end of 2025), the Samcheok Blue Power complex will reach an installed capacity of 2,100 MW. Considering that fossil fuels are a decisive contributor to climate change and that South Korea has officially pledged to phase out coal by 2050, the continued construction and operation of a new coal plant in 2024 appears paradoxical. This puzzle becomes even more striking given that Samcheok has been widely recognized as a region with a successful anti-nuclear movement, suggesting the presence of an active environmental politics and a history of resistance to energy megaprojects.

To explore this contradiction, this research investigates how fossil fuel infrastructure is sustained through intertwined “circuits” of capital, material, and affect. In doing so, the study engages with debates on the technosphere, understood as a global assemblage of energy systems, infrastructures, institutions, and material interdependencies that shape, and often constrain, social and ecological futures. Rather than treating infrastructure as a self-contained system with clear boundaries, the study proposes the concept of infra-circuits. This concept emphasizes that infrastructures function as nodal points within circuits that are simultaneously connected and closed: they enable specific forms of connection while restricting others, much like electronic circuits that allow flow only through certain configured pathways. Infra-circuits are also chained, meaning that if one link is disrupted, the stability of the entire configuration is threatened unless alternative routes can be mobilized.

Importantly, infra-circuits are not only spatial but also temporal. They operate through inherited material pathways, regulatory arrangements, financial instruments, and labor regimes that bind present energy decisions to past investments and future obligations. While this resonates with socio-technical systems theory and its emphasis on path dependence, the concept of infra-circuits allows for analytical dimensions that remain underdeveloped in conventional approaches to technological adoption and innovation. Specifically, it draws attention to how infrastructures endure by assembling heterogeneous circuits of matter, finance, and affect, thereby revealing the intimate relationship between fossil development and patterned forms of public sentiment, attachment, fear, and aspiration.

By highlighting the chained and temporally extended nature of these circuits, this study argues that fossil infrastructure persists not merely due to economic rationality or policy failure, but because it is embedded in technospheric arrangements that stabilize particular futures while foreclosing others. Ultimately, the concept of infra-circuits offers a framework for rethinking fossil energy infrastructure as a material and affective formation situated at the apex of ecological crises in the Anthropocene.