Momentum Shifts in the American Electric Utility System: Catastrophic Change—or No Change at All?
Year: 1996
Type: article
Abstract: Momentum Shifts in the American Electric Utility System: Catastrophic Change—or No Change at All? RICHARD F . HIRSH AND ADAM H. SERCHUK Electric utility executives and several business analysts claim that the American electric utility system began to change in the 1970s. They argue that the system, which binds together massive turbines, transmission lines, nuclear reactors, human decision makers, mil lions of customers, and countless other components, has somehow been transformed, even though its physical nature remains much the same. As evidence of the mutation, they point to the loss of con trol over the business of electricity generation and to the growing influence of scores of entrepreneurs, some ofwhom produce power with technologies once dismissed as fancies ofthe “counterculture.” At the same time, environmental activists and interventionist regula tors have realigned corporate business policies dramatically in some states by forcing utilities to enter the energy-efficiency business. Con trary to their business instincts, utility managers in these states must now “unsell” their product after nearly a century ofaggressively pro moting its use. While we acknowledge the major changes under way in the elec tric utility industry, we remain critical of the view, often accepted unanalytically within the industry itself, that the American electric utility system has been profoundly reshaped. Certainly, we agree with those participants who cite evidence ofpermanent restructuring. Yet we interpret many recent events as ways for established utilities to retain essential social and economic control over their industry. In Dr. Hirsh is professor of the history of technology and science and technology studies at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech). He is the author of Technology and Transformation in the American Electric Utility Industry (Cambridge, 1989) and several shorter pieces on the recent history and manage ment of the utility industry. Dr. Serchuk is research coordinator of the Renewable Energy Policy Project at the Center for Global Change at the University of Maryland. He received his Ph.D. from Virginia Tech in 1995, with a dissertation titled “Federal Giants and Wind Energy Entrepreneurs: Utility-Scale Windpower in America, 19701990 .”© 1996 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/96/3702-0003S01.00 280 Momentum Shifts in the American Electric Utility System 281 other words, though we concede the presence of change, we classify it as conservative (at least up to the early 1990s), intended to main tain vital aspects of the current system, rather than as a radical deconstruction of the way the nation supplies, distributes, and con sumes its electricity. Although both utility managers and their critics in the 1970s cast the system as rigid and endangered, it has proven able to assimilate numerous potential threats. Current policy makers and business analysts who warn of impending disintegration of the system may likewise underestimate its resilience and the ability of its human elements to defend their basic positions of control. In this article, we employ Thomas Hughes’s ideas about large tech nological systems to frame our discussion ofthe possibility of radical system change. After considering Hughes’s work, we address two stresses that have challenged the traditional actors’ control of the electric utility system: the emergence in a deregulated industry of new players who generate electricity, using California wind-power entrepreneurs as an example, and the impact of environmental ac tivists, also primarily in California, who have encouraged utility com panies to pursue conservation efforts. We describe two responses to those stresses: the incorporation of small-scale technologies into the electric supply grid, and the development of so-called demand-side management programs intended to increase energy efficiency. We then ask whether these responses signify radical structural changes or conservative modification of an essentially unchanged system. Fi nally, we offer a way to extend the conceptual value of Hughes’s notions of technological change. Systems and Change As a framework for this discussion of systems change, we refer to the work of Thomas Hughes, whose Networks ofPower: Electrification in Western Society and other works provide analytic tools for talking about change.1 Perhaps most important, Hughes demonstrates that the generation, transmission, and distribution of electricity occurs within a technological system. The continued existence of any such large technological...
Source: Technology and Culture
Authors: Richard F. Hirsh, Adam H. Serchuk
Language: English
Field: Energy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4367592623