From responsibilization to responsiveness through metrics: Smart meter deployment in Australia
Introduction
In Australia, for more than two decades, so-called ‘smart’ or ‘advanced’ meters have been installed that are capable of measuring electricity use in 30 minute intervals (or less) and that remotely read and report the values daily. Initially these meters were available only to large commercial and industrial customers but more recently they have been offered to households and small businesses. Today, most households still have older style pre-digital meters that are manually read, with the oldest variety providing only one data point every 3 months. However, a great deal of work is underway to replace these with digital smart meters that can provide 25,000 times more data in the same timeframe.
Smart meters are seen by energy industry and policymakers as a critical enabling device for new generation technologies and a more decentralized energy system. These future visions hinge on flows of detailed information about energy use and production that provide customers with greater choices around generating, storing and trading their own electricity as well as delegated energy management regimes by third parties and automated system optimization. Once meters are installed and operational, granular energy metrics can help firms segment the market into distinct energy consumer identities and intervene through new technologies such as nudges or remote control interventions. It is often suggested that consumers themselves can start to self‐regulate in response to the data and cost-reflective price signals, becoming carbon conscious citizens or cost‐conscious energy consumers.
Such smart urbanist visions with their rhetoric of intelligent and transformative digital change are generally decontextualized from the political economy of energy infrastructures. Smart metering creates new layers of legibility of appliances and bodies through the production, analysis and communication of metering data to firms, regulators, government agencies and back to households. With the smart meter, as with the smart city, such legibility or visibility is claimed to have widespread benefits to households whilst masking the value created for new entrepreneurial economic strategies and entrenched interests (Wiig, 2016). Futuristic visions of highly automated low carbon lifestyles are conjured so as to sanction specific interventions that produce uneven outcomes often exacerbating existing inequalities (Merricks-White, 2016). There is a need for critical scholarship to make manifest the underlying structures of power that shape the technologies of government in our everyday lives. Essential services like electricity and water are particularly fertile sites for such inquiry.
This paper examines the changing accountability regimes for the measurement of energy consumption data and links these to the evolving political economy of energy in Australia. The paper focuses first on metering deployment to show how industry, policymakers and regulators have not acted to lay the foundations for consumer self-responsibilization, and instead are preparing for new forms of delegated and automated decision-making around energy. The discursive shift from responsibilization to responsiveness enables different fractions of capital to reengineer relationships between households and the broader energy system in ways that circumvent accumulation problems from the ‘old’ energy economy.
Section snippets
From responsibilization to responsiveness
In the context of global warming ‘the environment’ has become an increasingly relevant rationality of rule for energy governance (Luke, 1995). In many advanced liberal economies, the question of how to govern and manage the major sectoral source of carbon dioxide emissions, stationary energy, has brought the socio-environmental relations of energy consumption and production into sharp relief. Previously opaque or invisible energetic relationships have been made legible and accountable through
Marketization and self-responsibilization in the Australian Electricity Sector
Australian States at the sub‐national scale have historically had jurisdiction over electricity. Through most of the 20th century each of these fragmented markets for electricity had a single state‐owned statutory authority that controlled the generation, transmission and distribution of electricity. These were centralized capital‐intensive systems of supply based mainly on coal that benefitted from low financing costs. The electricity industry played a critical role in state-led accumulation
Three recent developments in Australian energy metering
In this section I explain three key developments in Australia’s recent metering history to show that the rhetoric of self-responsibilization is not reflected in the actuality of metering practice. Instead, I argue that metering policies reflect the hard-fought accumulation strategies of key industry actors, and that decentralized consumer agency is either prevented through path dependent logics of network management or bypassed through emergent strategies of flexibilization.
Discussion
This paper argues that the focus on ‘measuring to manage’ energy consumption that dominates technocratic energy discourses needs to be countered by a focus on ‘measuring for accumulation’. The Australian case highlights how metering deployment has unfolded in the context of highly liberalized markets with heavily concentrated private ownership of assets, weak regulatory frameworks, and a strong bias towards cheap electricity for transnational firms. These state-market structures dominate the
Conclusions
This paper has shown the need for eco-governmentality analyses to be bolstered by political-economic perspectives in order to distinguish between the utopian claims of self-responsibilization and the necessary and sufficient conditions for the wide-scale emergence of carbon conscious subjectivities. The political-economy of an energy system as manifest in policies, regulation, industry structure and ownership, and market design significantly constrains the potential to govern through metrics
Acknowledgements
My thanks go to the organizers of the Summer Institute on Critical Studies of Environmental Governance in Toronto for which this paper was written, Professors Steven Wolf, Allison Loconto and Scott Prudham. The paper has benefitted from their generous and thoughtful comments on an earlier draft as well as from workshop participants. All errors are my own responsibility.
This article is based on research funded by the University of Melbourne Carlton Connect Initiative Fund No. 1554149, and
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