Technological Systems and Momentum Change: American Electric Utilities, Restructuring, and Distributed Generation Technologies.

Abstract

72 " To draw attention today to technological affairs is to focus on a concern that is as central now as nation building and constitution making were a century ago. Technological affairs contain a rich texture of technical matters, scientific laws, economic principles, political forces, and social concerns. " —Thomas P. Hughes, 1983 The American electric utility system has been massively transformed during the last three decades. Viewed previously as a staid, secure, and heavily regulated natural monopoly, the system has shed elements of government oversight and now appears to be increasingly susceptible to terrorist attacks and other disruptions. Overturning the conventional wisdom of the 1960s and 1970s, dependence on large-scale generation plants and high-voltage transmission networks now seems to decrease reliability of the system. The same hardware also subjects utility companies to pollution concerns at a time when environmental sustainability has become a serious political and economic issue worldwide. Clearly, much of the formerly sound thinking about the utility system has been overturned. But new thinking has evolved as well. For example , many people have begun advocating the use of small-scale, decentralized technologies known collectively as distributed generation (DG), which offers hope that the electric utility system may become more resilient and environmentally friendly in the near future. This article examines the reversal of almost a century of momentum in the electric utility system. To do so, it employs the nonengineering version of the systems approach, which has proven useful for analyzing sociotechnical enterprises. As a subtheme, the article explores long-term and cross-industry trends in the use of technologies; in particular, it notes that industrial use of large-scale technologies, which provide great economies of scale, may have reached limits in certain fields, such that small-scale technologies may have become better suited for use. As another subtheme, the article underscores the importance of nontechnical (i.e., social) action in the development of technologies. In the American utility system, the unintended consequences of an obscure law passed in 1978 spurred deregulatory efforts in the 1990s and the development of commercially viable renewable energy and distributed generation technologies. The encouragement of these environmentally preferable and DG facilities continued during the political chaos that emerged early in the twenty-first century, when utility restructuring became questioned in many states. Using the Systems Approach to Understand Technological Change To help understand the historical development of electric utilities, one can fruitfully use the " systems approach …