Keywords

This response to my planned research was from my first interviewee. I had just arrived in Australia from the other side of the world, family in tow, to start a four-year social research project on smart grids. Understandably, I was a little dismayed. But I knew for a fact that there were lots of smart grid projects and ideas around, and it was interesting that some saw smart grids as unfashionable. How do we make these sorts of judgements about policy and technology fashions, and what influences them? What are the popular stories that circulate about smart grids, and what do those stories leave out? These early encounters in smart grid research only confirmed what I already suspected, that smart grids are as much about society as they are about technology: smart grids are inherently social.

In Understanding Energy Innovation, I draw on new empirical findings from a four-year project on the social science of smart grids, including over fifty research interviews and several focus groups and workshops. My primary focus is Australia, but I also incorporate case studies from Europe and North America. The book is about the process of digital or smart innovation within the electricity sector, with a focus on the social and political. Simply defined, smart grids are the incorporation of new digital and information and communication technologies into utility infrastructures.

Understanding Energy Innovation sits alongside a host of technical books on smart grids and utility innovation and is deliberately quite different from these. The ambition here is to embrace, celebrate and learn from the messiness of social responses to smart grids, rather than ignore, curtail or curb society in order to facilitate smart grid implementation. In other words, the social aspects of energy sector innovation are celebrated and placed centre stage.

Who the Book Is for and How to Read It

In this book, I explore and explain energy innovation using smart grids as a case study. Energy innovation is something many of us are trying to get a better handle on as we grapple with climate change, high energy prices, unreliable supply, and the emergence of new technologies. I present a number of ways to think about and plan for energy sector reform and innovation, drawing on core ideas from social and innovation theory. I write about these theoretical ideas in an accessible, jargon-free way, recognising that a diversity of people have an interest in energy innovation generally, and in smart grids more specifically, and would like to find out more about different ways of understanding energy innovation from a social science perspective.

The book is intended to meet a growing demand for learning about social research among energy sector professionals in engineering, computer science, economics, and utility planning. I have observed growing interest from these professions in social research, having had the opportunity to work closely with industry and government on several collaborative smart grid projects over the past decade. Understanding Energy Innovation is also intended for academics and university (undergraduate and postgraduate) students. It is likely to be of particular interest to interdisciplinary postgraduates studying planning, energy studies, energy and society, environmental science, and environmental engineering.

The book can be read from cover to cover, but it is also designed to be picked up and put down. Each of the four main chapters—on networks, nodes, narratives and nostalgia—works as a stand-alone text, and the key ideas and learnings from each chapter are summarised in the conclusion.

Aims and Themes

My main goal with this book is to de-mystify social responses to innovation and show how unexpected things will happen with any innovation project. In the case of smart grids, many unforeseen events happened when smart grids were implemented, and the same interventions turned out differently in different places. The same is true for energy innovation more generally. The book uses the example of smart grid experiments to explore and explain energy innovation processes and to summarise learnings from smart grid experiments in several countries at the forefront of smart grid innovation.

Several detailed case studies are presented from countries where smart grid developments have rapidly advanced in the last decade, with a focus on Australia, Europe, and North America. The optimistic promise of smart grids is contrasted against what happened in practice with smart grid implementation. Technologies go wrong, budgets escalate, installers are not properly trained or are rushed, and the values and preferences of householders and other electricity customers are forgotten. Throughout the book, smart grids are used to illustrate wider energy sector innovation ideas, issues, and processes. From the politics of framing a smart grid project a failure, to the ways that new knowledge about smart grid technologies and ideas circulate globally and are tested in different places, the book takes a social science perspective to explore and ultimately celebrate the complex sociotechnical processes of energy innovation.

The four core themes of the book, which aim to capture key aspects of energy sector innovation from a social perspective, are networks, nodes, narratives, and nostalgia. These themes bring together relevant scholarship on technology innovation from human geography, science and technology studies, political science, and sociology. Each theme is explored under a separate chapter designed to work as a stand-alone text, introducing the key ideas and examining them through three short case studies.

  • Networks explores the many different types of network that social scientists study to better understand processes of change, from policy networks to sociotechnical networks. I draw on the well-understood and familiar example of an electricity network to shine a light on how a myriad of networks exist in society, albeit with different types of link between the components of each network. Some networks are primarily technical (like electricity networks), and some primarily social, but all have elements of both the technical and the social. Networks also all have in common a number of characteristics such as interconnectedness, flows, network-wide effects, and fragility. A focus on networks helps us better understand the social nature of energy innovation. I explore case studies on international smart grid policy networks, a local community network on Bruny Island, Australia, and a fragile network—a digital metering programme in the State of Victoria, Australia.

  • Nodes are closely related to networks, as nodes are fixed, stable passage points on networks. On an electricity network, a node is an electricity meter, an inverter, or a substation. But electricity network nodes can also be social things that operate in ways that provide predictability and order, such as organisations. A focus on nodes helps us to understand the ways in which stability is provided within complex networks, and how stability can quickly erode as the role of a node changes or there is a malfunction. The case studies presented here are about different types of nodes: the digital electricity meter, with a focus on household transitions in the UK and Australia; an electricity regulator, in this case, the Australian Energy Market Operator; and islands as nodes, with a focus on King Island, Australia.

  • Narratives centre on the stories that circulate in society that help us simplify and make sense of innovations such as smart grids. Narratives are helpful to study not only because of the things, people and organisations they speak to but also because of the things not spoken about—the silences. There are many narratives about smart grids. In the case studies, I explore a global industry narrative about households and their willingness to participate in smart grids; multiple narratives about a smart grid project in the State of Victoria, Australia; and a case of competing narratives of energy futures, examining off-grid and the hydrogen economy narratives.

  • Nostalgia is about a longing for the past: the way we remember how things used to be done and a wish for things to stay the same. Although nostalgia is pretty much the opposite of innovation, and therefore perhaps does not immediately seem relevant to this book, it is actually a central part of understanding social responses to energy sector innovation because every new technology and way of doing something is in effect competing with nostalgia. I examine how nostalgia can hamper efforts at smart grid innovation, particularly in how it blinds us to change already underway, but also how positive memories can act to encourage innovation. I analyse the effects of nostalgia by drawing on three diverse case studies: memories of pioneering international smart grid experiments and their present-day effect; a case study of the phenomenon of scarce data on off-grid households in Australia, which is shown to be linked to nostalgia; and nostalgia for big infrastructure revealed in tensions in planning for the future of the electricity grid in Australia.

Theories of Energy Innovation

There are lots of different concepts and theories to help us understand energy innovation. In this book, I focus on social perspectives: approaches that take society seriously and place people, organisations, values, and cultures centre ground. Social perspectives are distinct from the technical engineering and economic analyses of the energy sector that tend to dominate policy and industry discussion. These are about uptake rates, cost curves, value stacks, demand curves, and so on. While these topics are undoubtedly important, they only go so far in explaining energy innovation.

The main social theories about innovation in the energy sector—and utility infrastructures more generally—can be roughly categorised according to the scale of analysis and the issue or thing they are focusing on. Here I group the theories into two camps: people-technology interaction, and people-focused. I briefly summarise a large amount of academic scholarship on these theories below. If you wish to dive into the theory more, I recommend that you follow up on some of the references at the end of the chapter.

People-Technology Interaction

People-technology interaction innovation theories relevant to the energy sector cover two main topics: innovation in large-scale sociotechnical systems (electricity networks, transport infrastructures, gas networks), and small-scale human-technology interactions.

Large-scale sociotechnical system theories are generally about change over decades, such as how we moved centuries ago from a transport system based on horse-drawn carriages to one with motor cars (Bridge et al., 2018). They draw on research findings from historical examples. These sociotechnical theories provide a structure for thinking about how and why innovation occurs and the patterns of change. They help us understand by categorising different aspects of the innovation process. The main type of categorisation used across these theories is to do with the scale of change: from initial small-scale niche testing of new ideas and technologies, to diffusion up to regime level change, and finally, the broadest scale—enduring landscape level changes. The core idea is that innovations progress from the niche scale to the other levels over time. There are several slightly different variants of this scale-based or diffusion-over-time sociotechnical theory, including the multi-level perspective, strategic niche management, and large technical systems theory (Hughes, 1983; Kemp et al., 1998; Markard et al., 2012; Smith et al., 2010).

Small-scale human-technology interaction theories are primarily about the household and everyday energy technology interactions in the home. This area of research puts the household centre stage, exploring household behaviours, habits, and values, alongside the material and technical energy infrastructure of the home (such as type of housing material, technology used for heating and cooling or fuel type). It is a well-established area of innovation research, which dates back to the energy crisis of the 1970s (Guy & Shove, 2000; Hinchliffe, 1996). The study of the prosumer—households who both produce and consume energy—is a more recent focus (Parag & Sovacool, 2016).

In household human-technology research, the person and the technology are studied with equal attention. This method is called symmetry because it is about equal (symmetrical) attention to people and technologies (Callon, 1986; Murdoch, 1997). This approach has mostly been used in an area of research called actor-network theory. The detail of actor-network theory is quite involved, and there is not space to explain it here (see Latour, 2005 for a good summary), but it is about the relationships between humans and technologies, particularly the processes by which these relationships change and stabilise (see Chap. 2 for an example of its application).

A second area of research about household habits and patterns relating to energy technologies is social practice theory (Shove et al., 2012). A core idea of this area is that households are not deliberately consuming energy. Instead, they consume energy services, heating, lighting and so forth. These services could be provided in a number of different ways to households, using different technologies and different fuels, but with the energy service level remaining the same from the householder’s perspective. Therefore, to understand household demand for energy services, pretty much every aspect of day-to-day life in the household is relevant: what time people get up, what their washing and bathing habits are, whether there is someone at home during the day, and so on. There is a lot of diversity in households in terms of the energy infrastructure and how homes are made, as well as household preferences and ways of doing things. This type of detailed social research is fundamentally important to understanding energy innovation because there is a tendency in the energy sector to oversimplify and overgeneralise the response of householders to a new energy intervention (such as the installation of a household battery or solar panels) and assume that all households will react in pretty much the same way (Ellabban & Abu-Rub, 2016). Several studies have shown this is not the case, with considerable diversity between households (Bulkeley et al., 2016; ECA, 2020; Ransan-Cooper et al., 2020).

People-focused

People-focused theories are not directly about technologies or the energy sector. The ideas and approaches I use include discourse analysis, the study of narratives, and the study of memories and nostalgia. Although they stem from different social science disciplines, these concepts, at their core, are all about narratives. They are about stories concerning the present, past and future (including how these stories are remembered) that influence how we think about and act in relation to energy sector innovation. These approaches have been used in political science to understand change in policies and ways of governing (see e.g., Dryzek & Schlosberg, 1998) and in organisation studies to understand change (Czarniawska, 1997). These theories are distinct from the people-technology theories described above because they do not consider the role of technologies. I delve into these ideas in more detail in the chapters on narratives and nostalgia.

Defining Smart Grids

Here I provide some background on smart grids, as smart grids are the case study used throughout the book to explore energy innovation. If you already know a lot about smart grids, you may want to skip straight to the next chapter.

Smart grid concepts and practices have been applied to a range of utility modernisation projects in transport, water, and gas. But most smart grid activity to date has been with electricity, and electricity is the focus of this book. So from here on, the term smart grid is used to denote electricity smart grids unless otherwise explained. Smart grids are initiatives that involve the digitalisation of the electricity sector: the application of new computer science techniques and technologies to the electricity grid with the aim of improving its function. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology defines smart grids as:

the addition and integration of many varieties of digital computing and communication technologies and services with the power-delivery infrastructure. (NIST, 2014, p. 33)

And energy researchers expand on this as:

the modernisation of the electricity-delivery system to allow for greater automation in grid operation at virtually every node, including facilitating data communications and operations between all agents in the system, which include generators, system operators, and final demanders (consumers). (Guo et al., 2015, p. 7)

These definitions are typical in terms of putting the technical aspects of smart grids front and centre, with social objectives and the role of society given less emphasis. The graphic of a smart grid below (Fig. 1.1) is pretty typical of smart grid illustrations, which tend not to have any people in them.

Fig. 1.1
figure 1

Illustration of an electricity smart grid. (Source: iStock)

Full size image

Some definitions of smart grids are more people-focused, such as this one from a European Commission Task Force:

A Smart Grid is an electricity network that can cost efficiently integrate the behaviour and actions of all users connected to it—generators, consumers and those that do both—in order to ensure economically efficient, sustainable power system with low losses and high levels of quality and security of supply and safety. (EU Commission Task Force for Smart Grids, 2010, p. 6)

As this definition makes clear, smart grids have emerged in response to several policy problems: rising electricity prices, intermittent supply, and environmental sustainability. In this book, I examine some of these policy drivers (see, e.g., Case Study 4.1), but the focus is more on what happened with smart grid implementation. I note too that the majority of empirical material in the book is about Australia, and the policy drivers in Australia for smart grids have mostly not been about environmental problems (readers looking for an environmental analysis of smart grids might refer to Evans et al. (2019) or Gabrys (2014)).

Although, in general terms, smart usually means the integration of new digital capabilities into existing utility infrastructures (smart grids), confusingly, there are also smart cities, intelligent networks, smart homes and so on. Smart grid is also a bit of a catch-all term that brings together a range of different types of digital technology innovation in electricity networks. This adds further confusion because a project might be described as a smart grid but might incorporate different innovations to a smart grid elsewhere. Smart grids generally include one or more of the following:

  • new energy generation technologies such as solar photovoltaics and other renewable forms of generation;

  • sensors and other forms of measurement, such as digital meters, which provide real-time granular data about the electricity network;

  • communication networks; and

  • forms of electricity storage, such as batteries.

A Brief History of Smart Grid Innovation

The term smart grid first emerged and started gaining popularity during the late 1990s and early 2000s, when new digital technologies were being developed that allowed for a much more responsive grid system. Electricity meters—positioned as they are at the interface of the customer and the grid—were a particular focus in the early stages of smart grid innovation. It was the country of Italy that was at the forefront of innovation with their Telegestore project. Telegestore began in 1999 and was completed by 2006; it involved the installation of 32 million smart meters across Italy (ISGAN, 2019).

The period of 2008 to 2013 saw the most global activity in the use of the term smart grid (Google Trends, 2019). Since the mid-2010s, the use of smart grid as a term has waned in popularity somewhat, but this partly reflects the growth of other similar terms such as smart city. Smart grid and smart city are often used together, or interchangeably, because to date, most attention has been directed at smart grids in urban areas (de Jong et al., 2015). Urban areas are viewed as hotspots of innovation where the capital required for smart grids (such as finance and human resources) is present and where lots of utility infrastructures come together.

Smart grids are an expression and outcome of the rise of the internet and digital technologies in society. The core types of professionals involved in smart grids are computer scientists and information and communication technology experts. So, smart grids bring together the traditional energy profession of electrical and power system engineering with computer science. Smart grids aim to improve and modernise energy infrastructure. The electricity networks that have provided countries in Europe, North America, and Australia with centralised, reliable electricity have remained pretty much unchanged for almost a century. Here smart grid innovation is being driven by the availability of new information and communications (digital) technology but also by the ageing of energy infrastructures and the need for substantial repairs, upgrades and investment.

Several new energy policy problems have also emerged since our electricity grids were first built, that smart grids are seen as a solution to. The main problems have been described as the energy trilemma, the three interlinked problems of achieving energy security, mitigating climate change, and ensuring energy affordability (Bradshaw, 2013). For instance, climate change is increasing residential air conditioning requirements in many countries as temperatures rise. This extra demand from households requires better management of substantial afternoon and evening peaks in demand from the grid. In many countries, households are increasingly installing solar photovoltaic panels and other forms of electricity generation, which often require extra investment in the local grid to ensure the excess electricity fed into the grid does not adversely affect its operation. Investment in our electricity infrastructures are pushing up electricity prices in many places, which particularly affects low-income households, exacerbating energy poverty (ACOSS, 2018).

Even from this short summary, it is evident that there are a wealth of policy problems facing the energy sector and the electricity sector within it. Smart grids are one among a range of energy innovations being touted and tested in response to these problems.

In this book, I focus mainly on Australia, where I conducted most of my fieldwork on smart grids. Australia is a good place to study smart grids because it is one of the countries that has been at the forefront of electricity grid innovation internationally. This is because of early government investment in smart grids, digital meters, and household solar photovoltaics (rooftop solar). The growth of rooftop solar was incentivised by state government initiatives in Australia during the 2000s and encouraged by high electricity prices and a sunny climate. Just over a fifth of Australian households currently have rooftop solar (DISER, 2020). Because of Australia’s high proportion of household prosumers, the electricity grid has had to be adjusted to cope with the new two-way flows of electricity, not only to households but also from households. It is no surprise that household battery companies consider Australia as a key market.

Smart grids are an example of a policy initiative that promised a lot initially and came with much optimism and excitement. In the Australian context, the potential of smart grids has been described in very optimistic terms, for example, in a government strategy document about smart grid standards:

The optimal deployment of smart grids holds significant potential for the management of many of the challenges confronting the electricity supply chain in Australia. (Lazar & McKenzie, 2012, p. 1)

and by a government minister:

Smart grids represent the cutting edge of energy efficient technologies, applied in energy production, distribution and householder use, a frontier the Australian Government is committed to exploring quickly and strategically as we move to a low-carbon future. (Australian Government Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts, cited in DEWHA, 2009, p. 4)

As smart grids have become more widespread and have increased in popularity, some social scientists have criticised the lack of clarity about what smart actually means in practice. That is, how smart has been translated from a vision into something implemented on the ground. As the sociologist Hollands explains in relation to smart cities, “the disjuncture between image and reality here may be the real difference between a city actually being intelligent, and it simply lauding a smart label.” (2008, p. 305). This disjuncture between narrative and reality is something worth paying attention to with smart grids, as in practice, much of the original promise of smart grids has not necessarily been realised when they have been implemented (Lovell, 2019). This book explores how we can better understand this gap between the promise of smart grids and the reality.

Social scientists have also questioned the close (perhaps too close) alignment between smart grids and corporate interests, noting how:

Smart technologies may provide innovative ways to reduce carbon, decentralise energy generation, and provide security from external threats, but once they are released into the ‘real world’ they can become co-opted by corporate interests and subsumed under existing power relations. (McLean et al., 2016, p. 3253, emphasis added)

Such analysis adopts a critical stance to the smart ideology focus on economic efficiency, market function and business opportunities, with a lack of attention to issues of social equity and environmental sustainability. Identifying critical social and environmental justice issues within the optimistic (and typically business-orientated) narratives about smart grids has been a central plank of social science smart grids research to date (Evans et al., 2019).

Why Use Smart Grids as a Way to Understand Energy Innovation?

Smart grids are a good example of how what might seem like a purely technical initiative is, in fact, deeply social. As a manager of an energy advocacy organisation illustrates in his description of smart metering programmes (a central element of smart grids):

At the start we thought that this was a technical reform but what we realise now is that it was actually a social reform. And in treating it as a technical reform we got the social side of it wrong. That’s a common refrain that keeps coming up. (Interview, May 2015)

Smart grids also reflect something we often see across the energy sector, which is the mismatch between planned (often aspirational) objectives and the realities of implementation. In other words, how society has responded to smart grids is quite often a long way away from how those involved in smart grids thought it would at the planning stage. Overall, smart grid projects have taken longer to implement, have cost more, and have had fewer financial benefits than expected. There are lots of sensible explanations for why smart grid initiatives have not always worked as planned. Society is very diverse, there are multiple different interests in smart grids (including strong corporate interests and profit motives), and there are lots of new technically uncertain things and unknown risks. So, perhaps the better question is why anyone would ever think that a new smart grid project would run smoothly or be implemented and work in the same way everywhere.

To understand better the mismatch between smart grid objectives and actual implementation, we need to look to society. This is what this book is about: exploring the messiness of social responses to smart grids so that those of us involved in smart grids and other energy innovation projects can proceed with our eyes wide open.