Rethinking path dependence, technical innovation and social practices in a renewable energy future

Abstract

This article discusses how renewables are developing in the power grid in order to meet energy transition requirements. When renewables are understood merely as substitutes for fossil fuels, aimed at reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, they are seen to address only the supply side of electricity, which paradoxically maintains or even reinforces a form of demand incompatible with a low-carbon society. This article focuses on the problem created by a fragmented energy transition, which disconnects the evolution of social practices from technical issues. The electric socio-technical system is a complex in which are embedded techniques of production and provision, domestic devices, consumption habits, and lifestyles, and which supports the imaginary (of nature and society) and values on which the system is based. Drawing on a fieldwork on an off-shore wind farm project in France, this article first discusses the consequences of adapting flow energies such as the wind and sun to a power system historically made with and for storable and dense energy sources. Next, using the work of authors from the Palo Alto School (Watzlawick, Weakland, and Fisch), it shows how technical changes within an unchanged context come up against a paradox, which here results on maintaining energy-intensive practices. The article finally focuses on small-scale renewables development, and shows how technical innovations can induce a dynamic of social change when they occur at the margin of the current power grid.