Cin Fikir

This chapter tells Karpower’s origin story, exploring the intricate processes of creating and sustaining this infrastructure. Many people in the Turkish business community described Karpower’s ships as cin fikir, a quirky, effortless, but genius idea that circumvents expectations. Chapter 1 documents and analyzes how this cin fikir materialized, studying the emergence of Karpower’s floating power plants in the early 2000s and tracking how they were integrated into the Ghanaian grid in the 2010s. It argues that Karpower’s powerships arose as a cin fikir solution, first to a series of military interventions in Iraq and eventually to power cuts in Ghana (among other countries), reinforcing the dominant global energy order in which Global South countries’ energy infrastructure requires “remodernization” to maintain their trajectory on a presumed linear timeline. In this context, Karadeniz Holding’s cin fikir materialized through two complementary processes operating at different scales, relying on and altering global geopolitical and geo-economic relations as well as everyday habits of work. Through such interventions toward remodernization, fossil fuel–powered infrastructure continued to produce electricity for Global South countries such as Iraq and Ghana, facilitating energy accumulation.