Abstract
Current imaginaries of urban smart grid technologies are painting attractive pictures of the kinds of energy futures that are desirable and attainable in cities. Making claims about the future city, the socio-technical imaginaries related to smart grid developments unfold the power to guide urban energy policymaking and implementation practices. This paper analyses how urban smart grid futures are being imagined and co-produced in the city of Berlin, Germany. It explores these imaginaries to show how the politics of Berlin’s urban energy transition are being driven by techno-optimistic visions of the city’s digital modernisation and its ambitions to become a ‘smart city’. The analysis is based on a discourse analysis of relevant urban policy and other documents, as well as interviews with key stakeholders from Berlin’s energy, ICT and urban development sectors, including key experts from three urban laboratories for smart grid development and implementation in the city. It identifies three dominant imaginaries that depict urban smart grid technologies as (a) environmental solution, (b) economic imperative and (c) exciting experimental challenge. The paper concludes that dominant imaginaries of smart grid technologies in the city are grounded in a techno-optimistic approach to urban development that are foreclosing more subtle alternatives or perhaps more radical change towards low-carbon energy systems.
Highlights
Smart grid technologies play an increasingly important role in imaginations of urban low-carbon transitions
The environmental promises associated with smart grids attract many experts who are intrinsically motivated to make urban energy transitions work, we argue that dominant imaginaries accompanying the development of smart grid infrastructures at the local level are currently reinforcing the largely uncritical, techno-positivist logics of the global smart city paradigm
We argue that in Berlin, imaginaries of a future smart grid city are being coproduced through policies and implementation practices that are mutually reinforcing and which are being nurtured as much by environmental ideals as by the technical solutionism of the smart city
Summary
Smart grid technologies play an increasingly important role in imaginations of urban low-carbon transitions. The use of ICT in electricity networks is seen as a means to achieve low-carbon energy production through the integration of more (fluctuating) renewable energy sources, higher energy efficiency through the real-time coordination of resource flows, greater supply security through automatic grid reconfiguration and more active consumer participation in energy markets. Smart grids are conceived to accommodate fluctuating (renewable) electricity loads, enable flows to and from various decentralised sources, and respond flexibly to customer-specific demand. These features are enabled by an ‘energy information system’ (Bichler, 2012) that coordinates a complex web of producers, consumers and storage units. Smart grids offer a cleaner energy system based on more renewable energy sources, more efficient energy use through novel forms of storage and increased user participation through the integration of small-scale units of production
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