From responsibilization to responsiveness through metrics: Smart meter deployment in Australia

Abstract

Smart meters are a central element in strategies to create data-rich environments that enhance the rationalization and technical optimization of electricity production and consumption. Bold claims are made by industry and government that smart measurement devices will enable a new class of responsibilizing subjects who can be nudged and incentivized to orchestrate efficient low carbon energy governance. The carbon governmentality literature reveals the microphysics of power involved in responsibilization-as-governance. However, it insufficiently explains how the individualization of responsibility is shaped by and coexists with other sectoral and policy priorities, and political-economic imperatives. I show how the obdurate political-economic relations of the Australian electricity sector shape what can be measured, who can do the measuring, and who can access the metrics from smart meters. Utopian promises to govern for all by metrics are constrained by industry accumulation strategies, weak regulation and the embedded inequalities of infrastructural projects. I then show how responsibilization is being eclipsed by responsiveness as the new regime of accountability. Responsiveness bypasses active individual consumer decision-making, in favour of technologically-mediated automated processes. I show how responsiveness regimes are being driven by new whole-of-economy accumulation opportunities and enabled through the creation of a weakly-regulated sectoral market for electricity consumption data. Metering is a crucial but insufficient condition for the larger assemblage of responsiveness that involves data mobility through third party access, new forms of market competition, and value creation in demand response.

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.