ABSTRACT
Antti Silvast (0000-0002-1026-6529)
This chapter discusses the practical management of electricity infrastructure and concentrates on two electricity control rooms in a Finnish city’s electricity supply company. One is an electricity network room which manages the city’s electricity network by monitoring a number of ‘inputs’ and ‘outputs’: electric voltages along the network, the standard frequency of the distributed electricity and the stability and temperature of electric network components. Another is an energy market centre control room, in which the task is that of overseeing the city-owned electric energy production, monitoring many variables (from market prices to customers’ energy demands and the weather) and bidding for and offering electricity on an energy stock exchange organised around the Nordic countries, called the Nord Pool. I draw on ethnographic research undertaken in these two control rooms to provide new insight into the practicalities of making and operating infrastructures on a daily basis. I also show how important political visions about electricity supply and demand are in shaping the organisational contexts, spatial arrangements and legal mandates through which these infrastructures and control rooms function.
