ABSTRACT
The temporal dimension of sustainable energy transition – i.e. it has to be accomplished quickly – requires that hardware technologies are deployed and brought to scale as soon as possible. Achieving speed and scale requires integrating small-, medium-, and large-scale deployments, allowing them to spring, blossom, and sustain in parallel. As sociotechnical innovations are processed across these scales, actors need to recognize and understand their underlying and potential tensions and trade-offs, not just their synergies and benefits. While finding a middle way is vital, this cannot simply be true all the time. Linking and integrating the multiple approaches, scale, innovations, and interventions for deployments of the transition hardware require shifts in the ways policy, financing, and institutions are organized and ordered.
