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

Stability and transformation in the electricity system 77
actor groups, who represented different interpretations with regard to the
nature of the system and its organisation. The Edison-Insull interpretation
also started to structure activities of actors in fields relevant for the
electricity system, such as directions and agendas of R&D in the knowledge
field and regulations related to the electricity system in the policy field.
Hughes’ (1983) account of the evolution of electricity systems in the US, the
UK and Germany has been rather influential viewing large technical systems
as sociotechnical systems driven by co-evolution of social and technological
change. Hughes illustrates how electricity systems evolve distinctly across
countries as rather similar technologies become embedded differently in
various contexts because linkages between technical, industrial, juridical and
political aspects take different forms. His main purpose was to find out how
these systems are able to seemingly expand in a coherent fashion, or in other
words how these systems find direction and stable growth paths. He argued
that systems find direction and gain stability because general principles
emerge that become shared by actors in the system. As long as adoption of
these principles leads to satisfactory effects in terms of efficiency
improvement and/or expansion these actors are likely to stay in tune with
these principles if no major changes in circumstances occur (Hughes, 1987:
76, 79). The following principles became generally accepted as the central
station electricity system matured from the 1920s on (Hughes, 1983: 370-
371):
– Obtaining economies of scale with large generation units such as steam
and water turbines;
– Massing generating units near load centres of economical sources of
energy and near cooling water at giant power plants;
– Transmitting electricity to load centres through high voltage transmission
lines;
– Cultivating mass consumption by charging low and differentiated rates
allowing supply to create demand;
– Interconnecting power plants to optimise their different characteristics;
– Interconnecting loads to take advantage of diversity and thereby raising
load and demand factors;
– Centralising control of interconnected loads and power plants by
establishing dispatching, or system co-ordinating centres;
– Forecasting load requirements to achieve optimum operations within the
interconnected system;
– Lowering installed and reserve capacity and co-ordinating maintenance
shutdowns through the exploitation of power plants interconnections;
– Accepting governmental regulation to establish a natural monopoly;
– Earning a regular and adequate return on investment to obtain capital at a
reasonable interest.