Innovation and institutional change: the transition to a sustainable ...

Chapter 4
Stability and transformation in the electricity system 1
Explaining success and failure of paths taken
4.1 Introduction
This chapter characterises main structural changes that have taken place in
the electricity system in the past three decades. The purpose is to interpret
and explain the main dynamics in terms of interaction between technological
and institutional change. More specifically the aim is to understand the
nature of a range of paths taken in the past decades as dynamics either being
dominated by lock-in and path dependence, or as representing the formation
of a new path in which processes of escaping lock-in take a central role.
The electricity system has often been characterised as a large technical
system based on several components and technologies connected to each
other in a way that makes it difficult to switch to fundamentally different
technologies or to alter the design of the system (Hughes, 1983, 1987).
Within this perspective promising new technologies are not taken up because
this would require changes at other components and technologies due to a
misfit with the existing design of the electricity system. More recently
authors have broadened this perspective by also including features of ‘lockin’
at and between other dimensions, such as economic, infrastructural,
social, cultural, and regulatory (Martin, 1996; Unruh, 2000). Thus, while
monopolistic organisation enabled fast expansion of the electricity system by
locking in to a path of up scaling steam turbine technology and connecting
the countryside to the grid in the first half of the twentieth century (Hughes,
1983; Nye, 1990; Verbong, 2000), it effectively locked out alternative
energy technologies that were emerging in the 1970s and 1980s due to
1
Most data for this chapter were gathered in the framework of the MATRIC project:
Management of Technology Responses to the Climate Change Challenge, see Dolfsma et
al (1999), Arentsen and Eberg (2001), Hofman and Marquart (2001), Moors and Geels
(2001) and Von Raesfeld et al (2001). Support for the initial research by Hofman and
Marquart (2001) by the Dutch National Research Programmes on Global Air Pollution and
Climate Change (NRP) is gratefully acknowledged.
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