Securing the power grid through futures. How the lights stay on, and blackouts stay fictional dystopias.
Abstract as pdf
Corresponding Author:
Leonard Schliesser
Department of Geography, Durham University United Kingdom
leonard.f.schliesser@durham.ac.uk
Author(s):
This paper contributes to ongoing debates about the securitisation of everyday life and the governance of emergencies. It explores how anticipation ought to secure and prepare against the loss of the steady flow of electricity while the interconnected European power grids are undergoing a fundamental green and digital transformation. Thereby, I share insights from ongoing fieldwork around Germanies network operators, their regulators and my experience from within the German Federal Agency for Technical Relief (THW) looking at how the power grid as a critical infrastructure and ‘vital system’ (Collier & Lakoff 2015) is (digitally) secured.
The seemingly mundane process of forecasting power demand, generation and network load a day-ahead is shedding light on the immediate role anticipation plays in pre-empting dangerous grid states or the loss of power. A multitude of (automatically) calculated futures is created by different actors, exchanged, traded and fused into the operational schedules for the next day, as well as their intra-day relatives. Synchronised with the rhythms of the power markets and increasingly supported by ‘smart technologies’ these forecasts should ensure that the control engineers do not have to intervene, yet they must regularly become active to re-establish the network's balance. With the increasing loss of rotating mass, growing numbers of volatile generators as well as increasing powerline load the complexity – understood as the certainty of surprises - of the power grid increases, challenging not only the optimisation algorithms but also the physical limitations of the power grid.
Becoming known through forecasts potential threats to and constraints on the smooth flow of electricity can be identified a day-ahead, intra-day and addressed through the operational schedules while providing the network operator with reliability of expectation. As these forecasts, however, assume that demand, generation and network load are constant in their 60- and 15-minutes intervals they are always missed. Anticipating a deviation from the forecast the network operators are preparing in contracting tiered operating reserve that are supposed to stabilise and re-establish the balance of the grid. Similarly, to ‘stockpiles’ (Folkers 2018) these reserves function as shock absorbers and mitigate disruptions.
In examining the changing socio-technical constellations of forecasting and preparing that are to ‘keep the lights on' this paper highlights how futures in the power grid look like, become governable and where the limits of anticipation lie.
Anticipatory governance – Dealing with uncertain futures