Making Electricity Resilient

Risk and Security in a Liberalized Infrastructure

Antti Silvast

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315306094
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Volkswirtschaftslehre
• Subtopic: Nachhaltige Entwicklung

Energy risk and security have become topical matters in Western and international policy discussions; ranging from international climate change mitigation to investment in energy infrastructures to support economic growth and more sustainable energy provisions. As such, ensuring the resilience of more sustainable energy infrastructures against disruptions has become a growing concern for high-level policy makers.

Drawing on interviews, participant observation, policy analysis, and survey research, this book unpacks the work of the authorities, electricity companies, and lay persons that keeps energy systems from failing and helps them to recover from disruptions if they occur. The book explores a number of important issues: the historical security policy of energy infrastructures; control rooms where electricity is traded and maintained in real time; and electricity consumers in their homes. Presenting case studies from Finland and Scandinavia, with comparisons to the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union at large, Making Electricity Resilient offers a detailed and innovative analysis of long-term priorities and short-term dynamics in energy risk and resilience.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of energy policy and security, and science and technology studies.

Part I

Overview

1 Infrastructure, risk, and resilience

System transition and infrastructure fragilities

Large infrastructures – including electricity supply, heating, transportation, computer networks, and telecommunications – are widely believed to be vital and critical for the functioning of societies. This means that infrastructures ensure, for the most part, smoothly functioning political decision-making at all levels, including military defence, products and services, security, health, the movement of people, a functioning economy, and the welfare of populations (Graham & Marvin 2001; Collier & Lakoff 2008; Larkin 2013). Historical scholarship has highlighted the societal embeddedness of these infrastructure networks, coupling technologies, organizations, legislation, research efforts, and raw resources within the same structure (Hughes 1983; van der Vleuten 2004). Framed as an infrastructure, energy, too, can be characterized through its indispensability for contemporary forms of life. Not merely closed supplies or systems that support society, infrastructures rather sit at the centre of collective life (Edwards 2003, 2010).

These considerations in their turn almost immediately suggest issues about risk. On the one hand, large infrastructures are used to mitigate risks, increase collective security, and create conditions for economic activities. Hence, when infrastructures fail, this is on the other hand a risk to the economy, government, and the population – as major electric power failures and their aftermath, such as India in 2012, Continental Europe in 2006, and North America in 2003, have sharply demonstrated.

In this book, I contribute to knowledge about electricity infrastructures and interruptions by utilizing and contributing to social science perspectives on infrastructures and systems, risk, and resilience. The key overarching question is: how are interruptions to the electricity infrastructure anticipated, how are they managed as risks, and how do people and organizations bounce back from these interruptions? A growing community of social scientists is involved in the study of complex and socio-technical issues associated with energy systems. However, this discussion has tended to centre analyses on particular actors, settings, and viewpoints, such as technology policies, energy experts, or energy users only (see Silvast, Hänninen & Hyysalo 2013).

In contrast to the single-site studies, this book explores a number of special sites within the energy supply chain. The first case examines how national security experts mitigate electricity interruptions as risks to the population, government, and economy. In the second case, I turn to the management of interruptions as risks in the open electric power markets – a topical focus considering that energy infrastructures have been liberalized and opened to market competition all over the world for the past number of decades. The third case moves to energy consumers in their homes, which directly relates to the vitality of electricity networks for sustaining everyday life. This last empirical part of the book explores how lay people reconstruct electric power interruptions and their effects as risks in households. The impact of the detailed multi-sited work in this book is multifaceted: it recognizes long-term priorities and short-term dynamics in energy risk and also systematically interrelates policy, maintenance, and end-use perspectives on these risks.

The book sits among growing concerns in not only academic research, but also industry reports, policy papers, public statements, and other grey literature on electricity interruptions, risks, and resilience. Outages of electric power are now raised as a national security problem by a large number of governments, including the United States and more than 20 other advanced industrial countries and developing states such as Finland, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, Switzerland, Indonesia, and India (Brunner & Suter 2009, 530–531). For the US Department of Homeland Security (2013), for example, resilience is one in five core national priorities and the protection of US critical infrastructures, including energy, a major concern in that context (Sims 2011). In the United Kingdom, the risk of looming winter power blackouts makes national news (e.g. Davies 2016a) and the worry on national electricity capacity has reshaped the energy infrastructure’s components: diesel power firms have established specific diesel farms to stay on standby for situations where energy supplies may fall short (Davies 2016b). The European Commission (2004, 2005) and the European Council (2008), too, consider energy supply to be, along with transport, one of the two most important critical infrastructures in Europe. Recently, the European Commission (2015) summarized this concern in its strategy for an European-wide integrated energy system that is to withstand energy supply disruptions outwith Europe; that is, a “Resilient Energy Union with a Forward-Looking Climate Change Policy”.

Meanwhile, energy suppliers and their customers are also to be prepared for the power failing. The northeast US electricity grid operator National Grid US (2016), among many power companies, has issued guidelines on electric outage preparation and safety to its customers. Concentrating on large storms, its instructions span preparedness activities (such as stockpiling emergency kits), proactive crisis management (such as having a standby generator), and practices after the power comes back on (such as replacement and repair). In industrial policy, the European electricity company association EURELECTRIC (2014) seeks new ways to combine functioning energy markets with security of electricity supply, amid growing renewable energy resources in European power supplies. Advocating market solutions in particular, the association takes on the now familiar policy problem of intermittency in renewable generation – “with wind farms only able to generate when it is windy and solar power proportional to the amount of sunlight” as the United Kingdom’s recently appointed National Infrastructure Commission (2016, 19) explains this problem.

It is this great number of contemporary problematizations (Collier, Lakoff & Rabinow 2004) about energy interruption risk that suggest the relevance of this theme. However, the gap in knowledge in these contemporary debates is two-fold. The first shortcoming is conceptual: key security concepts such as infrastructure, risk, or resilience are occasionally defined, but rarely discussed or analysed in any greater depth. Understandably, this is perhaps part of their appeal: what the concepts lack in substance and depth they gain in flexibility, allowing the concepts to problematize a wide variety of contemporary events and issues. Infrastructure, risk management, and resilience indeed all denote positive capacities of systems, people, and communities and very few would perhaps question the pursuit of these capacities as such.

Nevertheless, more than three decades of research in the social sciences have scrutinized the concept of risk, large technological system, infrastructure, and resilience. In this book, I draw from this social science literature to add to the debates on alleged infrastructural fragilities in electricity supplies. Drawing from emerging research on risk governance, I argue that risk management is a process that encompasses a range of tools or techniques (O’Malley 2004) that has different uses, conceptual definitions, and hence effects across the energy supply chain. Furthermore, I do not understand the word infrastructure to point to any supportive or enabling structures in general, but as an object to be studied in its own right. Similarly, the concept of resilience is not seen just as an overall virtue, but is directed to the empirical interrogation of those practices through which people and organizations have bounced back from infrastructure disruptions. While such observations are commonplace in the social sciences and especially science and technology studies (STS), anthropological, and organizational studies literature, as I show below, they continue to be overlooked in contemporary debates around infrastructure risk and resilience.

My premises for the study of infrastructure risk and resilience lead to the second issue of concern: the relative lack of empirical observations on how infrastructures work and get used by people (cf. Star 1999). With a few exceptions, concerns over infrastructure fragilities are rooted in visions about future systems and sometimes rather loose assumptions about controllability, its lack, adaptations, and flexibility in power generation technologies and infrastructures – and increasingly also among energy consumers.

Policy reports all over the world once again suggest this point. Calls for more transnational, leaner, and flexible electric power infrastructures are imbued by worries over integrating variable renewable energy into energy supplies (see also Verbong & Geels 2007). From Finland (Finnish Roadmap 2015) and the European Commission (2015) to the United Kingdom (UK National Infrastructure Commission 2016), European industrial associations (EURELECTRIC 2014), and the United Nations Environment Programme (REN21 2016), many envision that more flexibility in the power system and in energy demands will solve this intermittency problem and produce the necessary malleability. This much is clear: if energy resources become variable, then the supply system, energy exports, or consumers will need to meet them by adaptive actions. However, these assumptions also suggest a rather strict division: some experts now talk directly to “non-controllable” renewable energies (Finnish Roadmap 2015), but fewer have explained how controllable incumbent energy generation was in the first place (cf. Silvast & Kelman 2013).

Yet, if infrastructures sit at the middle of collective life, we need to gain further and more systematic evidence about their functioning and effects in terms of risk and resilience. Adopting the well-honed tradition of infrastructure studies and STS, in this book I focus on this aim by “inverting” the electricity infrastructure. This means I will attend to the infrastructure itself, its history and context, and the real work that makes it come to life on an everyday basis (Karasti et al 2016; Parmiggiani & Monteiro 2016). To do so, my constitutive method follows the actors in this field, including security experts, network operators, and lay persons, and the ways in which they themselves attend to the power infrastructure and invert its structures in so doing, in their own ways and contexts – whether thinking about national security, infrastructure maintenance, or during a power failure. Building on interviews, participant observation, historical research, survey study, and policy analysis, the book unpacks the work of the authorities, planners, electricity companies, and lay persons that keeps energy systems from failing and helps them to recover from interruptions if they occur (see the Appendix for a detailed description of the materials). A review of the terms critical infrastructure, risk, and resilience explains how I build on the existing work, expanding on these themes and taking them into new directions.

Vital electricity infrastructure

Security discussions in the context of infrastructure, such as electricity, have changed in the past few decades. Concerns over security of supply in electrical power systems have existed for a number of years (e.g. EURELECTRIC 2006; European Parliament & Council 2009) and the close association of energy security with fuel import dependency dates back at least to the aftermath of the 1970s oil crises (Farrell, Zerriffi & Dowlatabi 2004). More recently, however, the discussion has adopted a number of rationales, concepts, and concrete tools from long-standing discussions within the military. Influential national and international policies have started to designate electricity as a critical infrastructure, which, as researchers see it, brings a specific national security issue to the fore (Collier & Lakoff 2008). This security issue concerns the protection of critical infrastructures from threats such as “natural” disasters, major technological failures, or terrorist attacks. Considering what then is such a critical infrastructure, historian Paul N. Edwards (2003, 187) cites a version of the following policy term definition of an infrastructure from the United States:

The framework of interdependent networks and systems comprising identifiable industries, institutions (including people and procedures), and distribution capabilities that provide a reliable flow of products and services essential to the defense and economic security of the United States, the smooth functioning of government at all levels, and society as a whole.

(US Department of Homeland Security 2013, 37)

These networks and systems become critical US infrastructures when their “incapacity or destruction … would have a debilitating impact on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination of those matters” (US Department of Homeland Security 2013, 29). The European Council and the Finnish government define a critical infrastructure or just an infrastructure as follows:

An asset, system or part thereof located in Member States which is essential for the maintenance of vital societal functions, health, safety, security, economic or social well-being of people, and the disruption or destruction of which would have a significant impact in a Member State as a result of the failure to maintain those functions.

(European Council 2008, Article 2(a))

The technical structures and organisations which are necessary for the population’s livelihood and for the functioning of society.

(SSS 2010, 36)

The definitions are clearly very different. For instance, the US definition views the flow of products and services as “critical”, while the EU and Finnish definitions designate infrastructure systems themselves as “critical”. And whereas the US definition mentions society as a whole and includes national public health, it lacks explicit consideration of social well-being and livelihood which are visible in the other definitions. Finally, in the US and Finnish cases, organizations and institutions are defined as part of an infrastructure, but they are not directly referred to in the European Union’s definition. Nonetheless, in one way or the other, all three texts designate infrastructures as those vital provisions without which the society as a whole could not operate (Edwards 2003, 187). In national and international policies, these provisions typically include electricity and energy, water supply, transportation and logistics, telecommunication and information and communication technologies, banking and finance, the central government, emergency and rescue services, and health services (Brunner & Suter 2009, 529).

The question of why infrastructures became such a significant security problem has also received scrutiny among academics. Some note the immediate impact of information technologies in the 1990s: policy concerns over security and risk in information and communication technologies became influential in the 1990s and have expanded to a host of other infrastructural provisions such as energy (Dunn Cavelty 2008). Histories in their turn highlight longer-term path dependencies – the vulnerability of current systems is elevated by their increasing complexity and growing energy demands, whose roots stem from a number of decades ago (Hughes 1983; Nye 2010; van der Vleuten & Lagendijk 2010). But anthropologists Stephen Collier and Andrew Lakoff (2008) point to a different and more frequently overl...