Kjetil Rommetveit

Bio: Kjetil Rommetveit is an academic researcher from University of Bergen. The author has contributed to research in topics: European union & Data Protection Act 1998. The author has an hindex of 10, co-authored 32 publications receiving 290 citations.

Who 'uses' smart grids? the evolving nature of user representations in layered infrastructures.

Abstract: This article addresses the anticipated use and users of smart energy technologies and the contribution of these technologies to energy sustainability. It focuses on smart grids and smart energy meters. Qualitative accounts given by European technology developers and experts reveal how they understand the final use and social impacts of these technologies. The article analyzes these accounts and compares the UK’s smart meter rollout with experiences from other European countries, especially Finland, to provide insights into the later adoption stages of smart energy and how its impacts have evolved. The analysis highlights significant differences in the likely intensity and manner of user engagement with smart grids and meters: depending first on whether we are considering existing technologies or smart technologies that are expected to mature sometime in the next decade, and second on whether the ‘user’ is the user of smart meters or the user of an entire layer of new energy services and applications. By deploying the strategic approach developed in the article, smart grid developers and experts can give more explicit attention to recognizing the descriptions of ‘users’ in smart-grid projects and to the feasibility of these expectations of ‘use’ in comparison to the possibilities and limits of energy services and applications in different country contexts. The examination of user representations can also point out the need for further technology and service development if some of the envisioned user profiles and user actions appear unrealistic for presently available technologies.

Technoscience, imagined publics and public imaginations.

Abstract: This essay begins from the intensified entanglements of technoscientific innovation with miscellaneous societal and public fields of interest and action over recent years. This has been accompanied...

Smart gridlock? Challenging hegemonic framings of mitigation solutions and scalability

Abstract: Urban energy transitions are key components of urgently requisite climate changemitigation. Promissory discourse accords smart grids pride of placewithin them.We employ a living lab to study smart grids as a solution geared towardsupscaling and systematisation, investigate their limits as a climate changemitigation solution, and assess them rigorously as urban energy transitions.Our 18 month living lab simulates a household energymanagement platform inBergen.Norway’smitigation focus promotes smartmeter roll-out as reducing carbon emissions, by (i)unlocking efficiency gains, and (ii) increasing awareness for demand-sidemanagement.Weproblematise this discourse. Raising awareness encounters intractable challenges for smart grid scalability. Scattered efficiency gains constitutemodest increments rather than the substantial change requisite for rapidmitigation.Whereas promissory smart grid discourse overlooks these ground-truthed limits, ourfindings caution against misplaced expectations concerningmitigation.We contest discursive enthusiasmon smart grids and argue for aligning local and systemic concerns before upscaling to avoid obscuring risks. Scaling up requires understanding and addressing interdependencies and trade-offs across scales. Focus group discussions and surveyswith living lab participantswhoused sub-metermonitors to track real-time household electricity consumption data over an extendedperiod show that technical issues and energy behaviour, aswell as political economic andpolicy structures and factors, pose significant limits to smart grids.Urban strategies for climate changemitigationmust be informedby this recognition.Our results indicate that upscaling relies onbottom-uppopular acceptanceof the salient technical, organisational and standardisationmeasures, but thatmeasures to improve the democratic legitimacy of and participation in energy transitions remainweak.Wehighlight limits to smart grids as a standalone urban mitigation solution and call for a sharper focus onaccompanying thrust areas for systematisation and scalability, such as renewable energy integration and grid coordination.

Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy

Abstract: The Study of Man. By Michael Polanyi. Price, $1.75. Pp. 102. University of Chicago Press, 5750 Ellis Ave., Chicago 37, 1959. One subtitle to Polanyi's challenging and fascinating book might be The Evolution and Natural History of Error , for Polanyi is at pains to expunge what he believes to be the false notion contained in the contemporary view of science which treats it as an object and basically impersonal discipline. According to Polanyi not only is this a radical and important error, but it is harmful to the objectives of science itself. Another subtitle could be Farewell to Detachment , for in place of cold objectivity he develops the idea that science is necessarily intensely personal. It is a human endeavor and human point of view which cannot be divorced from nor uprooted out of the human matrix from which it arises and in which it works. For a good while

Taking Rights Seriously

Abstract: 1.. HARD CASES 5. Legal Rights A. Legislation . . . We might therefore do well to consider how a philosophical judge might develop, in appropriate cases, theories of what legislative purpose and legal principles require. We shall find that he would construct these theories in the same manner as a philosophical referee would construct the character of a game. I have invented, for this purpose, a lawyer of superhuman skill, learning, patience and acumen, whom I shall call Hercules. I suppose that Hercules is a judge in some representative American jurisdiction. I assume that he accepts the main uncontroversial constitutive and regulative rules of the law in his jurisdiction. He accepts, that is, that statutes have the general power to create and extinguish legal rights, and that judges have the general duty to follow earlier decisions of their court or higher courts whose rationale, as l

Time and Narrative

Abstract: In the first two volumes of this work, Paul Ricoeur examined the relations between time and narrative in historical writing, fiction, and theories of literature. This final volume, a comprehensive reexamination and synthesis of the ideas developed in volumes 1 and 2, stands as Ricoeur's most complete and satisfying presentation of his own philosophy.

On Imagined Communities

Abstract: Benedict Anderson’s deservedly famous thesis about the origins and nature of modern nationalism turns around the central notion of an “imagined community.” This category provides him with a matrix out of which one can apprehend-theoretically and historically-the different variants of nationalist discourse formulated over the last two hundred years. We will refer, in the brief comments that follow, to three basic dimensions structuring the fabric of Anderson’s argument: 1) the presuppositions implicit in the notion of an “imagined” community; 2) the kind of substitutability or solidarity which is required to be a member of such a community; 3) the kind of relationship that is established between such a community-which is by definition finite or limited-and its outside. Before that, however, let us describe the main features of Anderson’s thesis.