Strategies and praxis of energy supply in Slovenia

Energy supply is one of the most important economic processes in the economic life, especially in the modern economic system. It is one of the central phenomena and activities, present constantly at the background of the ongoing processes. The transition to new energy sources represents a technological and social turning point. Energy resources are the symbol, or rather the motive or consequence of the technological progress. The introduction of new energy resources is the result of the scientific and technical revolution at the turn of the nineteenth century, the result of the basic innovative and applicative processes. The adoption of these achievements in real life has caused far-reaching consequences in all aspects of the economy, landscape and people's lives – in the technical, technological and consequently also economic and social context.
This general and very broad definition also underlines the goals of the project: to explore and interpret the multi-layered historical aspects, that is, the strategy, manner and practice involved in the energy supply in Slovenia in the last century and a half. As a demanding technological, economic, ecological and social process, the ways and contexts of energy supply have also had profound effects on the structure of the economy and society. The problem of energy dependence defines the modern societies and their strategies of the economic and social development significantly. A stable energy supply is definitely more than a simple technological or economic paradigm. It is a fact that energy supply is impossible to reduce to such narrow categories. Namely, in time it has become the way of life. Therefore in the conceptualisation of the research problem we can emphasise, as the central research goal of the example of energy supply, the process dynamics of co-dependence or interdependence of energy supply technologies and socio-economic structure in a long-term historical perspective.
Basically the project is divided into two fundamental levels. The first one involves the chronological aspect at the vertical level, and the second one involves the substantive aspect at the synchronous level. At the vertical level the research can be divided into the basic energy resources in the last two centuries: wood, coal, electricity, gas and oil, or the mutually intertwined periods defined by the aforementioned energy resources. Within these temporal coordinates the substantive thematisations of the energy industry in Slovenia take place. Here the contents are also divided into two aspects – two backgrounds, defining or allowing the energy supply. Conditionally these two aspects can be referred to as the technological and social aspect of energy supply.