Innovating Relations - or why smart grid is not too complex for the public

Revamping the electricity infrastructure to allow for an increased usage of renewable energy sources is a matter of concern in many parts of the world. In Europe, a major policy question is how to move energy demand to periods with surplus of renewable energy in the grid. In this paper we follow prominent Danish and German delegates working towards realizing the intelligent electricity infrastructure commonly known as ‘smart grid’ envisioned to be a significant actor in the management of renewable energy. Starting out with a view on smart grid that recognizes it as a partially existing object, we attend to its gradual emergence by focusing on two models and a metaphor evoked to represent smart grid development. As we contrast and compare these representational objects, smart grid emerges as a potential ‘thing’. Following Latour a ‘thing’ is a gathering of many actors agreeing and disagreeing about what the thing ‘is’ (its ontological status). In the paper we show how smart grid innovation both emerges – and fails to emerge – as an object of relevance to a broader public. Even though users play an important role in the imagination of experts, a gap remains between the experts and those who smart electricity infrastructures will come to affect. Concerned with this gap we argue that Science and Technology Studies must pay attention to how smart grid development gets constructed as a public problem in specific imaginative spaces of opportunity and closure.

[1]  Patrick Devine-Wright,et al.  Making electricity networks “visible”: Industry actor representations of “publics” and public engagement in infrastructure planning , 2012 .

[2]  B. Latour.  Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern , 2004, Critical Inquiry.

[3]  C. Jensen.  Continuous Variations , 2014 .

[4]  J. Law,et al.  Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices , 2002 .

[5]  Ontologies for Developing Things: Making Health Care Futures Through Technology , 2010 .

[6]  Bruno Latour,et al.  On the Partial Existence of Existing and Non-existing Objects , 2000 .

[7]  Helen Verran,et al.  Ethnographic stories as generalizations that intervene , 2012 .

[8]  K. Hetherington.  Foucault, the Museum and the Diagram , 2011 .

[9]  B. Latour,et al.  Making Things Public : Atmospheres of Democracy , 2005 .

[10]  Geoffrey C. Bowker,et al.  Second Nature once Removed , 1995 .

[11]  Kate Burningham,et al.  Renewable Energy and Sociotechnical Change: Imagined Subjectivities of ‘the Public’ and Their Implications , 2010 .

[12]  Christopher A. Le Dantec,et al.  Infrastructuring and the formation of publics in participatory design , 2013 .

[13]  Brit Ross Winthereik,et al.  Monitoring Movements in Development Aid: Recursive Partnerships and Infrastructures , 2013 .

[14]  Noortje Marres,et al.  Issues spark a public into being: A key but often forgotten point of the Lippmann-Dewey debate , 2005 .

[15]  Helen Verran.  Staying True to the Laughter in Nigerian Classrooms , 1999 .

[16]  Mark R. Johnson.  Material Participation: Technology, the Environment and Everyday Publics , 2013 .

[17]  Inge Røpke,et al.  Constructing users in the smart grid—insights from the Danish eFlex project , 2013 .

[18]  Bruno Latour,et al.  Visualisation and Cognition: Drawing Things Together , 2012 .

[19]  Michael Guggenheim,et al.  The Reality of Experts and the Imagined Lay Person , 2003 .

[20]  Madeleine Akrich,et al.  The De-scription of Technical Objects , 1992 .

[21]  Brit Ross Winthereik,et al.  Making technology public: Challenging the notion of script through an e-health demonstration video , 2008, Inf. Technol. People.

[22]  Michael Nye,et al.  Making energy visible: A qualitative field study of how householders interact with feedback from smart energy monitors , 2010 .