Smart Grids Transitions

Working Group 7 “Smart Grids Transitions – on Institutional Change” investigates institutional, governance and socio-technical issues associated with Smart Grid deployment as a long-term endeavor. It intends to support the development of transition pathways and processes leading to electricity systems with distributed energy resources feeding into local grids.

Sustainability transitions or system innovations are radical changes of systems, through which human needs, e.g., energy, mobility, or food, are satisfied. The systems are conceptualized as ‘socio-technical’ to indicate that not only the technology and infrastructure have to be fundamentally reorganized to motivate a system overhaul but also societal aspects such as markets, policies, or user practices and behavior. The concept of ‘innovation’ in ‘system innovation’ thus refers to the innovation of the entire socio-technical system and not only to product, process, or services’ innovation. Socio-technical systems are further organized and operated according to a specific set of organizing principles in selecting technologies, the actors and their influence and behavioral possibilities. These organizing principles are embedded in a variety of institutional environments, which are enacted and reproduced by actors and actor networks who mobilize the technology and build infrastructure to deliver societal functions, see Figure

Institutions are meant as sets of rules, norms and beliefs that regulate but do not define perceptions and activities of actors; and can be of regulative, normative, and cognitive type. Institutions are the rules of the game and are also imprinted in material elements, technology, and infrastructures created by the actors in the given context and time. The rationale shared by a group of actors, constitutes a basis upon which systems operate, gives a system stability and the ability to coordinate actions of social groups by shaping what is considered allowed, legitimate, and probable. Although systems are difficult to change, actors, who are knowledgeable agents and not passive-rule followers or passive recipients of technologies, can actively use rules to interpret the world, make decisions and act. They may exercise their agency by disagreeing on the basic rules, reflexively interpreting, or purposefully deviating from what is considered normal.

[Source: Program of Work ISGAN Working Group 7]

~~DISCUSSION|Discussion Section - PAGE OWNER: Klaus Kubeczko~~