Introduction—Smart Grids: Design, Analysis and Implementation of a New Socio-technical System

If smart grids aim to contribute to a more sustainable production, transportation and use of energy by design, its ‘selfmanagement’, ‘reliability’ and ‘transmission’ need to incorporate factors it has ignored so far. This book intends to open a window into that direction by merging a variety of approaches of smart grids. As such it builds on the four-year experience of the interdisciplinary Groningen Energy Summer School, run by the University of Groningen and Globalisation Studies Groningen (GSG). This School unites staff and Ph.D. students from a wide range of academic disciplines in one programme: engineers, lawyers, chemists, sociologists, physicists, philosophers, economists, geographers, psychologists, political scientists, historians, geologists and computer science experts. Over the course of two weeks, they try to incorporate the best of each other’s expertise into their own. The Ph.D. students have to present each other’s work: a lawyer needs to come to grips with algorithms that run distribution systems, or an engineer needs to understand how speech acts create social realities. This book as a whole represents that practice. The individual chapters, however, reflect the expertise of the authors. Some of them combine various disciplines, but the true transdisciplinary exposure of this book is the added value created by the sum of its parts. To strengthen this we have added Points for Discussion to each chapter, emphasizing the broader context, and helping readers from other fields understand the relevance of a particular kind of expertise for larger questions about smart grids. It is our hope that this book will be an instrument to rethink the boundaries of smart grids as a concept, making it more inclusive and reflexive, and therefore more adequate for shaping a sustainable energy future.