Flexibility of real-time energy distribution: the changing practices of energy control rooms

This paper examines the linked concepts of flexibility and control, focusing on how these are enacted in the operation of control rooms in Distribution Network Organisations. We discuss the limits to flexibility, and the kinds of flexibility that are at stake in distribution network control of gas and electricity. We do not present a general history of flexibility in UK energy system control rooms, but we show how the legacy of past ideas and practices of energy distribution control feed into current control operations, and how they shape flexibilities in control systems. The article examines the kinds of flexibility demanded of control room engineers in the face of imperfect systems and unpredictable faults.publishedVersio

Energy systems integration as research practice

This article adopts frameworks and methods from Science and Technology Studies for examining Energy Systems Integration (ESI). ESI, the integrated operation and planning of multiple energy supplies and demands, can contribute to improvements in energy reliability, security and flexibility, and therefore facilitate a transition to a low carbon economy. The article examines UK research towards integrated computer models of energy system ‘vectors’. The research is based on fieldwork and participation in a large ESI research project in the UK, drawing on interviews, workshops and observations. We highlight three main contributions to the studies on ESI and STS research of modelling. First, ESI researchers are aware of the social, economic and political context of their work, though many of these contexts are difficult to incorporate in any useful modelling process. Second, issues that touch on both science and policy around energy systems were the motivation for ESI researchers yet were also underemphasised in project work. Third, we develop unique mixed ethnographic methods to study ESI and that enable researchers to build relations of trust with research participants that contribute to the discussion of sensitive topics such as the politics and ethics of energy modelling approaches.publishedVersio

Ethnographies of Power: a political anthropology of energy

Energy related infrastructures are crucial to political organization. They shape the contours of states and international bodies, as well as corporations and communities, framing their material existence and their fears and idealisations of the future. Ethnographies of Power brings together ethnographic studies of contemporary entanglements of energy and political power. Revisiting classic anthropological notions of power, it asks how changing energy related infrastructures are implicated in the consolidation, extension or subversion of contemporary political regimes and discovers what they tell us about politics today

[Disability] justice dictated by the surfeit of love:Simone Weil in Nigeria

How is Nigeria’s failure to fulfil its obligations as a signatory of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to be appreciated or even resolved? Answers to this are sought through a seminal criticism of human rights, namely, Simone Weil’s 1942 essay Human Personality. Weil questioned the ability of human rights concepts to cause the powerful to develop the emotional dispositions of empathy for those who suffer. Weil’s insights provide a convincing explanation that the indifference of Nigerian authorities towards the Convention may be accounted for by the weakness of human rights discourse to foster human capacity for empathy and care for those who suffer. Weil’s criticisms will serve as a point of departure for a particular way to circumvent this inadequacy of human rights discourse to achieve disability justice in Nigeria through other means. I argue that Weil, through her concept of attention, grappled with and offers a consciousness of suffering and vulnerability that is not only uncommon to existing juridical human rights approaches, but is achievable through the active participation in the very forms of suffering and vulnerability in which amelioration is sought. To provide empirical content to this argument, I turn to a short-lived initiative of the Nigerian disability movement, which if ethico-politically refined and widely applied, can supply an action-theoretical grounding for and be combined with Weil’s work to elevate agitations for disability justice above human rights to the realm of human obligations