Demonstrating a Flexible Electricity Consumer: Keeping Sight of Sites in a Real-world Experiment

ABSTRACT

Real-world experiments have become a common method for testing and developing new technologies to decarbonize the energy system. The significance of the site of such experiments is evident yet elusive. A case in point is the Danish island Bornholm, test site for a smart grid experiment involving more than 800 private households. The object of intervention of this experiment is the so-called flexible electricity consumer; a means for countering radical increases in fluctuating, renewable energy that challenges the stability of the electricity system. A flexible consumer adjusts consumption to production rather than the other way. Accordingly, the experiment seeks to knit together the electricity system infrastructure and its users in new ways. The island provides the boundaries for this experiment, all the while it is endowed with multiple politics by its various participants. To the scientists running the experiment, Bornholm is their living laboratory: it provides a partly controllable electricity system upon which to test their reorganized energy system. To local participants, however, the experiment is above all a demonstration of their commitment to the island and its role in a green transition. Finally, during the experiment, the local energy supplier begins to frame the island’s energy system and its users as assets; a test island for future participatory experiments. Eventually, the site of this real-world experiment makes a flexible consumer possible as object of intervention, yet at the same time, it transforms the scientific results produced and the identity of the island.

KEYWORDS:

• Real-world experiment
• site
• renewable energy
• demonstration
• laboratory
• flexible consumer

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The term laboratory is here used in a strict sense, not a metaphorical sense as implied in Knorr-Cetina's (1995) laboratory turn in which a number of studies have adapted the laboratory as a lens for observing the production of knowledge in society more broadly involving sites such as the factory, offices or market places (Miller and O’Leary, 1994; Knorr-Cetina and Bruegger, 2002; Yaneva, 2005).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Trine Pallesen

Trine Pallesen is Associate Professor at Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School. She works at the intersection of STS and economic sociology. Empirically, her interests cover the organization of markets and engineering as a form of intervention, particularly in the energy sector.

Peter Holm Jacobsen

Peter Holm Jacobsen is postdoc at Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School. His empirical interests cover energy markets and consumption practices as well as architectural competitions.