Transforming power/knowledge apparatuses: the smart grid in the German energy transition

Abstract

Politics and the dominant actors in the German energy system fear that the politically promised integration of renewable energies in the course of the Energy Transition will lead to losses of control due to increasing volatility, decentralization and heterogeneity of processes and actors. Yet, a novel form of control through the artificial intelligence of smart grids is envisioned that would tame the chaos in the system. To analyze the conditions and effects of smart grids we introduce the Foucauldian concept of a “power/knowledge apparatus” into the study of sociotechnical transitions. It brings into focus the entwined changes of positions of actors, knowledge and power constellations and their effects. These are crucial to innovation and transformation processes, yet the question how they emerge is only marginally addressed in other science and technology studies approaches. The article analyzes the problem framing and solution by smart grids as an emerging power/knowledge apparatus which implies a comprehensive re-arrangement of the power/knowledge constellations in the energy system. The order and ordering of the emerging apparatus of transformation is getting visible by an empirical case study based on expert interviews and document analysis. The apparatus aims at and engenders a permanent experimentation of all relations between the actors, organizations, techniques, knowledges, etc., which are included in an energy system based on the envisioned smart grid.

Keywords:

• power/knowledge dispositif/apparatus
• sociology of expectations
• vision assessment
• sociotechnical systems transitions
• real-life experiments
• energy transition
• smart grid

Acknowledgements

We thank our colleagues Knud Böhle, Stefan Böschen, Patrick Sumpf, the journal's editor, Thomas Pfister and two anonymous reviewers for their feedback to this text. The empirical research for the analysis was undertaken as part of the Helmholtz Alliance “Energy Trans” (www.energy-trans.de).

Notes

1. “The smart grid” is thus actually a huge variety of different ideas and experimental designs of “smart grids” (Goulden et al. 2014; Engels and Münch 2015; Skjølsvold and Ryghaug 2015). One of the most prominent and regionally distributed field experiments with smart grids in Germany was the program “E-Energy”. E-Energy was a consortium which tested the implementation of smart grid designs in different pilot projects in six regions of Germany (BAUM Consult GmbH 2012; BMWi 2014). The project E-Energy took place from 2007 until 2013 and was a federally funded R&D project involving industry, research and municipalities (www.e-energy.de, accessed 30 September 2015).

2. This is the typical question that is being asked by research on sociotechnical systems and transitions of these systems (e.g. Hughes 1983; Geels 2005). See also our critique of these approaches in Section 2.

3. If we speak about “power” in this article, we follow Foucault's definition of power in History of Sexuality, Vol. 1:

[P]ower is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society. [ … ] Power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away; power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations. (Foucault 1978, 93–94)

Three dimensions of his power conception are mainly important for us: the “multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate”, the character of “support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system” and finally the overall “strategies in which they take effect”, for example, “in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies” (92).

4. See also on the analytical value of the apparatus concept Rabinow and Rose (2003, 9).

5. This can be bodies to be disciplined or the sex which needs to be investigated and domesticated. “Sex [ … ] is doubtless but an ideal point made necessary by the deployment [apparatus] of sexuality and its operation” (Foucault 1978, 155).

6. As Büscher and Schippl (2013) point out, it is still highly unclear how exactly relationships between the heterogeneous elements in the presumed sociotechnical systems are enabled and how they function.

7. In addition the debate on “visioneering” (McCray 2012; Nordmann 2013; Schneider and Lösch 2015) as active and strategic processes for influencing and steering innovation- and transformation processes connects the research issue “visions” closely to processes of future making through design.

8. In the project “visions as socio-epistemic practices” we enlarge this focus to understand the practical effects of visions in innovation and transformation processes (http://www.itas.kit.edu/english/projects_loes14_luv.php; accessed 30 September 2015).

9. “By creating the imaginary element that is ‘sex’, the deployment [apparatus] of sexuality established one of its most essential internal operating principles: the desire for sex – the desire to have it, to have access to it, to discover it, to liberate it, to articulate it in discourse, to formulate it in truth” (Foucault 1978, 156).

10. Manderscheid (2014) and Tyfield (2014) similarly try to reorientate Foucault's analysis towards a real-time analysis of sociotechnical change.

11. As is the case in Foucault's studies which always entangled empirical material with theoretical reasoning.

12. The empirical work was conducted within the research project “Systemic risks in energy infrastructures”. This project is one project of the Helmholtz alliance “Energy-Trans” (http://www.energy-trans.de/english/68.php; accessed 30 September 2015).

13. See the huge variety of smart grid prototypes realized in E-Energy (BMWi 2014; www.e-energy.de; accessed 30 September 2015).

14. The “Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz” (Renewable Energy Sources Act) in Germany is said to establish a decentralized logic of power generation from renewable energy sources against the prevailing centralized logic.

15. Digitization has to be considered as the latest step in what Beniger ([1986] 2009) called the “control revolution” unfolding from the nineteenth century onwards to coordinate the increasing complexity of sociomaterial processes in industrial societies. Digitization, understood as an ongoing process, establishes and transforms relations amongst subjects and objects and the sociotechnical ecologies that they form together. It thus also changes the subjects and objects and the forms of coordination between them (Thrift 2011; Hörl 2013).

16. This perception of our interviewee is in accordance with the results EU research on smart grid projects which also showed the high uncertainty concerning the social side of smart grid innovations (Covrig et al. 2014, 11).

17. We borrow this term from Latour (2011).

18. Other research has also shown that roles and relations are becoming reconfigured in smart grid experiments and that this is not unidirectional (Katzeff and Wangel 2015; Throndsen and Ryghaug 2015).

19. Other research on smart grids similarly points out the difficulties in communication between experts, users and publics (Schick and Winthereik 2013).

20. Such universals are no general transcendent “truths”, but to borrow from Srnicek and Williams (2015, 78): “Universalism, on this account, is the product of politics, not a transcendent judge standing above the fray. [ … ] The universal, then, is an empty placeholder that hegemonic particulars (specific demands, ideals and collectives) come to occupy”.

21. See Foucault's relational and productive understanding of power sketched in endnote 3.

22. Through this permanent experimentation of a former stable system the established governance structure is shaken and thus questions of a governance of trust in the system become explicit (Büscher and Sumpf 2015).