Smart gridlock? Challenging hegemonic framings of mitigation solutions and scalability

Abstract

Urban energy transitions are key components of urgently requisite climate change mitigation. Promissory discourse accords smart grids pride of place within them. We employ a living lab to study smart grids as a solution geared towards upscaling and systematisation, investigate their limits as a climate change mitigation solution, and assess them rigorously as urban energy transitions. Our 18 month living lab simulates a household energy management platform in Bergen. Norway's mitigation focus promotes smart meter roll-out as reducing carbon emissions, by (i) unlocking efficiency gains, and (ii) increasing awareness for demand-side management. We problematise this discourse. Raising awareness encounters intractable challenges for smart grid scalability. Scattered efficiency gains constitute modest increments rather than the substantial change requisite for rapid mitigation. Whereas promissory smart grid discourse overlooks these ground-truthed limits, our findings caution against misplaced expectations concerning mitigation. We contest discursive enthusiasm on smart grids and argue for aligning local and systemic concerns before upscaling to avoid obscuring risks. Scaling up requires understanding and addressing interdependencies and trade-offs across scales. Focus group discussions and surveys with living lab participants who used sub-meter monitors to track real-time household electricity consumption data over an extended period show that technical issues and energy behaviour, as well as political economic and policy structures and factors, pose significant limits to smart grids. Urban strategies for climate change mitigation must be informed by this recognition. Our results indicate that upscaling relies on bottom-up popular acceptance of the salient technical, organisational and standardisation measures, but that measures to improve the democratic legitimacy of and participation in energy transitions remain weak. We highlight limits to smart grids as a standalone urban mitigation solution and call for a sharper focus on accompanying thrust areas for systematisation and scalability, such as renewable energy integration and grid coordination.

Ethics of quantification: illumination, obfuscation and performative legitimation

“…It also requires tracing the networks and practices of increasingly coordinated transnational infrastructures that underpin the new 'data economy'. The modalities of quantification are typically decided at higher levels of decision-making than the individual level that is being quantified through data extraction, posing the question of whose seeing is enabled and empowered, and who is merely 'being seen' without the required mechanisms for checks and balances on the watchers (Sareen and Rommetveit, 2019). Major decisions often take place in a socio-spatially centralised manner, with little room for representation of individual concerns and preferences by the citizens they affect.…”

A Typology of Practices of Legitimation to Categorise Accountability Relations

“…But what practices are observable and how can their study contribute towards more accountable energy transitions? At the household or individual scale, germane issues include determining the appropriate levels of compensation for flexibility added to the grid based on distributed storage, as batteries become affordable and electric vehicles proliferate, as well as disincentives to prevent users from loading the grid during peak demand periods (Sareen and Rommetveit 2019). Several aspects of financial legitimation can in fact be studied in great empirical detail: what are the challenges actors have to face in securing financial backing to install and operate different energy sources; how do these requirements vary across sources; how are these financial parameters set and by which authority?…”

Reframing Energy Transitions as Resolving Accountability Crises

“…Traditional authorities like ministries are changing their names and structures, demonstrating a commitment to an energy transition or even an ecological transition, responding to and reshaping social imaginaries (Tidwell and Tidwell 2018). Regulatory bodies are grappling with more complex issues than ever before with the advent of the 'smart grid' and questions of big data, ownership and privacy alongside energy efficiency, dynamic tariffs and prosuming (Sareen and Rommetveit 2019). There is emerging excitement linked with energy storage and the prospects of a highly flexible grid where electricity can be stored at decentralised nodes, opening up options for massive shares of renewable energy sources to be integrated into the grid supply mix.…”