Paper short abstract:

My paper studies the management of risk and security in electricity infrastructures in Finland. Going further than a single-site focus (e.g. design, policy, or end users), it uses the biography of artefacts perspective to move between three sites: national security, control rooms, and households.

Paper long abstract:

Energy risk and security have become topical issues in Western national and global policy discussions, ranging from international climate change mitigation through to investing in energy infrastructures to support economic growth and more sustainable energy provisions.

My paper takes current energy issues to its focal point and studies how security and risk are seen as problematic and produced as issues to be solved in the liberalized electricity infrastructure in Finland. In-depth STS and social science works have already covered several aspects of these issues: including infrastructure security policy, high reliability organizations, privatization of infrastructures, and energy system transitions and innovations on multiple societal levels. However, among the main challenges in this discussion, especially in STS which is my main frame of reference, has been reliance on a single kind of actor, field site, viewpoint, or setting as the main source of information, such as end users, energy policy, or technology design.  

To address this tendency to centre analyses on particular actors, the presentation draws from the biography of artefacts perspective to analyse three sites in the Finnish electricity infrastructure: history of national infrastructure security, actions in electricity control rooms, and electricity blackouts in households. Data from these sites cover long-term priorities and short-term dynamics of electricity risk, and include design, maintenance, as well as end use perspectives. The presentation pays specific attention to how the field studies were designed, using existing theoretical and empirical understanding about them, and uncovers how interconnections among these sites can be traced.