Promises and Pitfalls of Smart Grid - Smart Grid (R) Evolution: Electric Power Struggles - page 18

cybersecurity and individual privacy. A recent article in Counterpunch , a well regarded
investigative journalism publication, demonstrates these extreme views by describing
smart grid as “an eco-health-safety-finance debacle with the potential to increase energy
consumption, endanger the environment, harm public health, diminish privacy, make the
national utility grid more insecure, cause job losses, and make energy markets more
speculative” (Levitt 2011 ) . This negative perspective evokes concerns about “Big Brother”
and underscores fears of the expanding reach of corporate and/or government entities
infringing on the lives of individuals and communities.
Beyond the extremes at either end of the spectrum, most people see both promises and
pitfalls of smart grid. Generally, most people emphasize the positive potential of smart
grid more than its negatives. Our recent research on media analysis of smart grid found
that newspaper articles in the New York Times , Wall Street Journal , and U.S.A. Today
all report the positive attributes of smart grid potential more than negative aspects of the
technologies, with a ratio of four positive mentions to every negative. In our focus groups
and interviews with more than 200 stakeholders professionally involved in the electricity
system, we also found that participants were more likely to introduce and discuss the
promises, rather than the pitfalls, of smart grid. Deployment of smart grid - particularly
installation ofsmart meters -has,however,engendered intense discussion ofthesmart grid
pitfalls. Recent social science research on smart grid in the Canadian provinces of British
Colombia, Ontario, and Quebec has shown that the pitfalls of smart grid are especially
prevalent in the public discourse during periods of smart meter deployment, but once the
meter deployment phase is finished, the promises once again become more prominent
(Mallett et al. 2014 ) .
Although we recognize the existence of exclusively technological promises and pitfalls,
our focus throughout this topic is on the dynamic sociotechnical interactions between
technical systems and larger societal contexts. These interactions are especially relevant
for legitimacy in democratic systems. So in this chapter we focus on the broad social and
technological categories of promises and pitfalls as they relate to:
(1) reliability and security;
(2) the economy;
(3) environmental quality;
(4) citizen empowerment.
While some of these promises and pitfalls are relatively independent of each other,
othersareinterconnected inmultiple, complexways.Thegoalofthischapteristohighlight
the spectrum of perspectives, including both the promises and the pitfalls, of smart grid.