I have shouted at the wind on this site a number of times that entities like Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) need to acknowledge that what they are responsible for, is the equivalent of Electrification a century ago. That transition involved an extensive public education process. The effort put into social learning was on the same scale as that put into the technical engineering (and government financing). There was the acknowledgement that the infrastructure transition was only going to work if people were brought along with it, if communities were helped developing new practices, adopting new values, and taking into account new risks. One of the key transition mechanisms for rural electrification was giving communities effective ownership of the new energy systems through cooperatives. Electrification 2.0 is perhaps a harder transition because it is not moving from no-electricity to electricity, which is patently systems change, but instead shifting baked-in habits and mental models associated with the old unsustainable electrical system. For 100 years, households were told 'it comes to you so set and forget because it can kill you; it will always be on so use it whenever, but be thrifty lest you get retrospective bill shock.' The coming distributed energy system, where households and small businesses act not just as energy consumers, but also producers, storers, distributes, and 'grid balancers,' displaces or reverses every one of these entrained everyday sociotechnics. The unlearning and learning that people need to be HELPED to do is vast. But instead the transition is being approached in the most risk-averse manner under the fantasy that the body politic can be price-spiked into change. The sole theory of change seems to be more neoliberalism. Everyone claims to be a customer-advocate with too few doing the hard social research of working with households and communities over the long term, treating people, you and me, as partners in value-creation. There should be, for example, as many anthropologists and sociologists working at AEMC, as non-social researchers. And as with Electrification a century ago, the AEMC should be a major commissioner of cultural productions - posters, movies, deliberative democracy town halls, school curricula, etc.
Christopher Alexander - great insight here.
Professor of Digital Technology and Society
2moWe’re working on it Cameron 😊