Presentation short abstract

We examine how Norway’s hydropower participation in Nordic frequency control markets redistributes technical, financial, and ecological risks. Using interviews, market analysis, and novel acoustic analysis, we show how balancing practices shift risks across infrastructures, places, and communities.

Presentation long abstract

Hydropower in Norway is often narrated as stability: reservoirs as batteries, waterfalls as kinetic promise. Yet when the grid’s pulse slips from 50 Hz, stability depends on a nested market ecology: day-ahead, intraday, and balancing, whose “risk work” redistributes exposure across watersheds, bidding zones, and institutions. We examine the spatial configurations of risk in Norway’s participation in frequency control markets, tracing how risks are produced and lived across communities, infrastructures, and places. We ask whether practices framed as risk mitigation in fact reconfigure and redistribute risks, shifting them across scales, geographies, and experiences. Sound is both method and metaphor: the steady hum of turbines, the hiss of inflow and spillways, the abrupt alarms of operational disturbance, and the everyday acoustics of river communities. Listening becomes a way to attend to the relational boundaries through which risks are defined, translated, and experienced. Through interviews with hydropower operators, grid actors, municipal owners, and Nordic frequency balancing market practitioners, paired with market analysis, acoustic measurement and field recordings, we trace how balancing actions and settlement routines re-locate technical, financial, and ecological risks. We argue that contemporary market coupling and Nordic settlement centralization perform risk shifting rather than risk mitigation: from transmission system operational risk toward balance operators via imbalance pricing and collateral and from generators toward local ecologies through redispatch and curtailment. Listening - analytical and situated - opens an entry to these translations, surfacing boundaries that otherwise remain invisible and inaudible yielding a novel embodied methodology for tracking uncertainties.