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Accepted Paper:

Markets as vehicles for energy transitioning. Understanding techno-economic demonstration in the field of smart grids  
Catherine Grandclement (EDF RD) Alain Nadai (Centre national de la recherche scientifique)

Paper long abstract:

Climate policy goals increasingly have to be reached through techno-scientific innovation and market coordination. This paper is about this new mode of assembling technology, policy and markets in the field of energy, more specifically in the field of "smart grids".

"Smart grids" are a booming topic of techno-economic development. It refers to a bi-directional grid conveying energy flows and real-time information both in a top-down and a bottom-up manner. While in the conventional electricity grid generation had to follow consumption, in the smart grid consumption could be made to follow generation. This opens up new possibilities of grid management especially on the demand-side of the electricity system where intriguing concepts such as "active demand", "demand-response" and "negawatt" are the topic of on-going market development. In France and elsewhere in Europe, the State promotes the development of smart grids and "active demand" through trials and demonstration projects on which public money is invested.

The paper is about the organizing of those demonstrations and trials. In them we can recognize a mix of ideas originating from the field of science and technology (use of a protected and controlled setting to develop and test a technology) and from the markets (competition will accelerate the development of working technologies and drive down their costs). Following Rosental (2005, 2009), however, I consider that demonstrations are as much about proving and persuading as about constituting and engaging various sorts of publics and of markets. A detailed analysis of how these projects work in practice is conducted in order to understand their performative effects.

Panel F2
Can markets solve problems?
  Session 1 Thursday 18 September, 2014, -