To build or buy? Marketization of flexibility services in the Norwegian distribution grid

Electricity grids are expected to play a key role in energy transitions as facilitators that absorb the impacts of transitions in other sectors. This article examines how challenges with strained grid capacity are addressed through making local flexibility markets for trading end-user flexibility. Using the markets-in-the-making approach that conceives markets as framings (Callon, 2016, 2021), we examine the construction of conditions in which flexibility could be sold as a service to distribution grids in Norway. The empirical material analyzed consists of interviews with professionals in 2020–21 and observations from Norwegian Smart Grid Conferences (2020−2022). Our analysis focuses on selected processes seeking to create new frames for market transactions, including how flexibility is framed as an ‘explicit’ good by constructing measurement arrangements; how distribution grid companies are framed as buyers who need flexibility and can evaluate and use the flexibility good; and how framing seeks to make flexibility comparable with grid upgrades. We find that these framing processes seek to engage and transform a large number of actors to construct the evaluation arrangements for flexibility. We discuss how flexibility is framed to enable the articulation of flexibility's active impact on the grid and also to assure that flexibility activation is passive in other respects. We conclude that marketizing flexibility is not best understood as unlocking a vast, pre-existing resource but rather as a process of transforming actors and sociomaterial arrangements to shape flexibility into a knowable object that a wide array of actors can evaluate.