Through analysis of the orientations, conflicts and challenges of recent energy–climate policy in Stockholm, this paper interrogates how energy and climate become (translated as) a set of issues which come to matter in the local urban arena for different social and political interests. Drawing in particular on recent theoretical work on urban materiality, it is argued that ongoing, ‘everyday’ local struggles over the processes and practices of transformation of the urban fabric constitute repoliticised settings through and in which the orientations of urban energy transition are materially understood, experienced and performed in diverging ways. In ‘mapping’ the undulating politics of energy–climate matters, the paper outlines an alternative way of following and/or measuring energy and carbon flows through the urban environment.