We need more network capacity! But why do we get it? Infrastructural refraction and the contingencies of network growth and energy transitions

Torik Holmes has a new article in Technological Forecasting and Social Change on why ‘We need more network capacity’.

It is accepted that electricity networks need to grow in scale and scope to facilitate decarbonisation. It is also accepted that infrastructural change is incremental.

Yet, the incremental delivery of network capacity and the relevance of this for energy transitions have received little attention. Instead, broader, evolutionary accounts of change predominate.

Opportunities therefore remain to conceptualise and study the incrementality of network growth and to consider the implications of this for energy transitions. I conceptualise investment in network capacity as an outcome of infrastructural refraction: as emergent of varied and unevenly distributed histories and geographies of electrification beaming through and being refracted by the prism of socio-technical infrastructure in ways that condition the sited reconstitution of network capacities.

Examining practices of translation, enacted by network operators, provides a method of revealing the constitutive details and dynamic of infrastructural refraction.

A case study focused on the technological framing of the delivery of a 33 kV substation in Central Manchester is explored. The analysis stresses the importance of examining the contingencies of investment in capacity. This paper contributes a concept-method package that helps reveal such details and by proxy the polycentric politics of electrification, investment in electricity network capacity, and energy transitions.

You can read the full article here.