Towards New Energy Justice: The Conceptual Reconstruction of Smart Grid Construction

Western energy justice theory originated from the environmental justice and climate justice movements, centering on distributive, recognition, procedural, and restorative justice. Although it has contributed to revealing energy inequities, it is embedded with philosophical flaws such as anthropocentrism, epistemic relativism, narrow individualism, and moral utopianism. These deficiencies lead to practical challenges including low transition efficiency, neglect of security justice, and a strong Western-centric bias, rendering it incapable of effectively guiding the development of smart grids in China. Rooted in the practice of Chinese-style modernization and the stance of historical materialism, a new energy justice framework should be reconstructed. This framework takes efficiency justice as its material foundation, emphasizing the role of productivity development in defining the conditions and boundaries of distributive justice. It adopts new distributive justice as its guiding goal, anchoring common prosperity as the ultimate value and achieving shared developmental outcomes through baseline assurance and national coordination. It regards security justice as a fundamental safeguard, encompassing the three dimensions of energy structure, technical infrastructure, and data security. It employs procedural justice as a rule-of-law method, integrating the energy transition into the railway of law-based governance. This four-dimensional, dialectically unified new energy justice not only systematically transcends Western theories but also provides a China-rooted theoretical guide for smart grid construction that addresses the shared challenges facing humanity.