Socio-technical path dependencies

I like the concept of techno-industrial order and how it is identified so well by Winner and Parthasarathy. While Winner goes through the historical progression of this thought process, and introduces the concept of inanimate artifacts having inherent politics, Parthasarathy writes about the competing systems of medicine in the USA and the UK. This artifacts and their supporting networks do indeed have politics, as well as momentum and a codified structure that gives momentum to certain pathways. We can view the energy industry through this filter and gain some insights about the power in a metaphorical sense, in addition to the generation, movement, and use of electrons over grids.

For instance, the European philosophies of dealing with energy are quite different from the American point of view. In Europe, the land has been distributed and put to use in ways that have a lot more path dependence than the relatively young United States. They have fought over land and resources for hundreds of years and some boundaries in eastern Europe are still fungeable. When electrification came to that continent it played out differently than in the US and the modern inclinations reflect that history.

An example is rural electrification. Individual European countries such as the Netherlands embraced the ideology of rural electrification as serving a wider national public good. The pace of rural electrification was fairly quick and expansive. By contrast, electrification in the United States occurred at a much faster pace in the cities and only slowly in the rural areas. It was expensive and the privatization of electric companies (utilities, in today’s parlance), while offering innovation, also set up a landscape where profit had to be given equal consideration to other public goods.

Those two differing mindsets play out in today’s energy markets in similar ways. Europe has been quick to pick up on renewable technologies, such as Solar in Germany and Wind in the UK and Netherlands, while the US has deliberated over the very desirability of these technologies and who is going to pay for them. Our mixed system of private and publicly funded infrastructure now is an immense patchwork of multi-owner, multi-regulated cables, towers and generating plants. The concept of distributed power is a very real threat to the funding structure and the philosophical stability of the Utilities. Thus, it is not given the same serious consideration or institutional support as in Europe. While the Europeans have been quick to fund such projects as part of the public good, the US is still debating and may be doing so for some time. This is how power and institutions have inherent political leanings.