Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

Using Valuation Studies and a relational lens on expertise, the case of EU’s vision for Energy Highways is used to explore the role of anticipatory digital technologies such as digital twins and energy modelling that increasingly are required to predict and intervene to render a resilient future.

Paper long abstract

The transition to renewable energy is ever more struggling to address the issue of building a resilient, independent and secure energy future. With renewable energy increasingly providing larger shares of generation in the energy system and with demands for sector-coupling, critical infrastructures have become fragile towards internal as well as external threats. As a counter measure, predictive control system algorithms implemented in digital twins have come to constitute a new centre of anticipatory governance. Based on a lens of Valuation Studies and a relational lens on expertise, we use the case of the EU’s vision for centralised Energy Highways, with centralised gigawatt-scale ‘energy islands‘ and green hydrogen Power-to-X technologies, to explore the role of anticipatory digital technologies such as digital twins and energy modelling that increasingly demand the likes of AI and quantum computing technologies. Through interviews conducted with Transmission System Operators, control system manufacturers, research institutes, as well as (inter)national organisations, we probe the contested ontological and epistemic bases of predictions and future knowledge for governing the energy transition when a flexible energy system must be responsive and anticipatory both in terms of internal faults but also external (cyber and physical) threats in order to prevent crises and black-outs. We further discuss how the resulting future knowledge about how the energy system is contested and challenged, e.g. in terms of favouring a more centralised and/or decentralised energy system, displays controversy over which futures predictive technologies render visible or invisible, and over which futures are rendered actionable for decision-making.