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Electricity in the United States

by

Canay Ozden-Schilling

B.A. Political Science and International Relations

Bogazici University, 2007

M.A. Near Eastern Studies

New York University, 2009

Submitted to the Program in Science, Technology, and Society in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society

at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

June 2016

2016 Canay Ozden-Schilling. All Rights Reserved.

The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly paper and

electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now known or

hereafter created.

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His My, Ant opology, and Science, Technolog

nd Society

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Michael M. J. Fischer

Andre W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities

Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies

Thesis Supervisor

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Stefan Helmreich

Elting E. Morison Professor of Anthropology

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Certified by:

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7 7Susan

Silbey

Leon and Anne Goldberg Professor of Humanities, Sociology and Anthropology

Professor of Behavioral and Policy Sciences, Sloan School of Management

Thesis Committee Member

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Timothy Mitchell

Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies

and Professor of International and Public Affairs

Thesis Committee Member

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Christine Walley

A ociate Professor, Anthropology

Director of Graduate Studies, History, Anthropology, and STS

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David Kaiser

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Professor of the History of Science

Professor of Physics

Department Head, Program in Science, Technology, & Society

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Electricity in the United States

by

Canay Ozden-Schilling

Submitted to the Program in Science, Technology, and Society on May 4, 2016 in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History, Anthropology,

and Science, Technology, and Society

ABSTRACT

This dissertation is a study of emergent economic forms of life. It investigates recent remakings of economic existence and modes of disseminating these forms of life, and does so with

particular reference to the crafting of electricity markets in the United States. It draws on more than a year of fieldwork among experts and users involved in electricity exchange. The experts and users among whom I conducted participant observation include computer programmers who assist companies that trade in electricity markets by collecting information and making trading

suggestions, electrical engineers who design new infrastructures such as electricity markets for buying and selling electricity in bulk, psychologists and social scientists who study people's electricity consumption behavior to generate economic technologies to save money to users and providers of electricity, and citizen groups based in West Virginia and rural Illinois that organize against electricity markets' exclusion of consumers from decision-making mechanisms.

Bringing questions of economic anthropology to bear upon the emergent literature of the anthropology of infrastructures, I propose that new economic forms of existence often come to being though infrastructure building and maintenance. For the last 20 years, experts of diverse technical backgrounds have been reprogramming the electric grid to allow for enhanced calculative choice and competition - principles at the core of the neoliberal agenda. I demonstrate that people who do not necessarily concern themselves with the formal study of economics often take the lead in creating and propagating wide-ranging economic emergent forms of life, such as neoliberalism, across the social field. To zero in on their work, I develop the concept of "techno-economics": an approach that understands commodities, whether they are living nonhumans such as livestock or inorganic processes like electricity, as more than passive receptacles of human design, and locates humans within their efforts to commoditize and marketize unruly objects, like electricity - a commodity that cannot be stored in warehouses or shipped on highways. Anthropological studies of the techno-economic, I suggest, are best equipped to make connections in ethnographic representation between otherwise disparate nodes of social life, like expertise and wires, law and steel, and finally, economics and electricity.

Thesis Supervisor: Michael M. J. Fischer

Title: Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities

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Every dissertation writer knows that it takes a village to bring a dissertation into the world. Mine owes its existence to the support and sustained faith of an exceptional dissertation committee. Over the years, Mike Fischer's mentorship has broadened my horizons in countless ways and given me models of scholarly thinking that I can only hope to emulate. Stefan Helmreich has steadfastly sharpened my ruminations into arguments: every page of this dissertation has been informed by his dedicated advising, and so has my sense of myself as a scholar. From Susan

Silbey, I have learned the methods of scholarly pursuit; I will always be grateful to her for holding me to her high standards. Finally, since my first days in graduate school at New York University, Tim Mitchell has inspired me to feed my curiosity into the questions that matter. With the submission of this dissertation, nothing makes me happier than the honor of joining them as colleagues.

Along the way, a larger community has steadily helped me arrive at the questions I am most passionate about, as well as at better ways to answer them. Among the affiliates of HASTS, our academic home, I am grateful to the reading, support, and encouragement of Lerna Ekmekgioglu, David Kaiser, Heather Paxson, Harriet Ritvo, Chris Walley, and Susann Wilkinson. Karen Gardner's guidance in navigating academic waters has been indispensable. At NYU and

Bogazigi, exceptional scholars made me want to be a scholar by following their example. Koray Ialikan, Yegim Arat, and Shiva Balaghi have done more for me than they know. Over time, it has become hard to distinguish who I am from the questions of political economy that I pursue in this dissertation: the many amazing friends who ruminated on life and justice with me on road trips to the east; the artsy, the lefty, and the queer who taught me the beauty of the struggle; those who brought me up all the way to the fearless age of twenty-two - I hope they don't mind if I

credit them collectively under the name of Istanbul, the great city I am fortunate to call my hometown.

The research underlying this dissertation was made possible thanks to many generous people. Though they must remain anonymous, I thank the traders, analysts, and other market participants who have brought markets to life for me in long conversations. My stay at CMU was only possible thanks to Marija Ili6's boundless generosity; Ines Azevedo, Jhi-Young Joo, Milos Cvetkovic, and Chin Yen Tee's warm welcome proved critical to my research and my stay in Pittsburgh. In West Virginia and Illinois, Keryn, Patience, Mary, and Susan welcomed me to the fascinating and important world of electricity activism. I am endlessly excited about future conversations with them. Financial support for this dissertation was provided by HASTS, the MIT Energy Institute, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. I have been fortunate to be able to develop and share the key arguments of this dissertation with excellent audiences. For providing me with such great venues, I thank Dominic Boyer, Stephen Collier, Elizabeth Ferry, and Sheila Jasanoff. I also thank Simone Abram and Brit Ross

Winthereik for inviting me to the 2016 workshop, "Electrifying Anthropology," in Durham,

U.K., where I had the pleasure of connecting with a brilliant community of electricity scholars.

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The Infrastructure of Markets: From Electric Power to Electronic Data. Economic Anthropology

3 (1): 68-80. Published Wiley-Blackwell, 2016 American Anthropological Association.

Neither the dissertation nor my life would have been anywhere near complete without my chosen family. Marie Burks and Shreeharsh Kelkar are my gang; Amah Edoh is my rock; Shira Shmuely and Ashawari Chaudhuri are my sisters. I hope they know how much I depend on them. Other friends knew just when this dissertation needed one more citation and/or one more beer. In

HASTS past and present, they include Orkideh Behrouzan, Renee Blackburn, Kieran Downes,

Xaq Frohlich, Amy Johnson, Clare Kim, Nicole Labruto, Lan Li, Xi Emily Lin, Lucas MUller,

Peter Oviatt, Beth Semel, David Singerman, Ellan Spero, Mitali Thakor, Michaela Thompson, and Nate Deshmukh Towery. Beyond HASTS, my sincerest thanks go to Hayal Akarsu, Ash Arpak, Esra Bakkalbagioglu, Stephanie Friede, G6kqe Gtnel, Ekin Kurtiq, Leksa Lee, Ced Oner and Aykut

OztUrk,

Aytug $agmaz, Andy Rosing and Stephen Tapscott, Aneil Tripathy, and Mengqi Wang for making my Cambridge years more productive and pleasurable.

My parents, AytUl and Ercan Ozden, have always had the unwarranted conviction that I knew

what I was doing with my life. I have never known what it is like not to take their trust for granted, and for that, I am grateful to them. Along with the dissertation, my nuclear family grew to include wonderful new people: I thank the extended Schilling clan for being so fun to hang out with and so reassuring a presence. Finally, I'm still in awe of the good fortune that has put me on the same path as my favorite person, my center and my destination, my partner in all things, Tom Ozden-Schilling. Together we grow each day and there is nothing more important.

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T itle ... 1

A b stract...3

A cknow ledgem ents...5

T able of C ontents... 7

Introduction ... 9

Chapter 1. Deregulation: Regulation, Reshuffled...47

Chapter 2. The Infrastructure of Markets: From Electric Power to Electronic Data...85

Chapter 3. Cultures of Optimization: Making Smart Grids, Markets, and Other Complex Sy stem s...117

Chapter 4. Homo Economicus in the Age of Big Data: Using Electricity and Becoming an E conom ic A ctor...163

Chapter 5. Citizen Electric: Liberal Challenges to Neoliberal Electricity...201

C onclu sion ... 255

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Introduction

What is techno-economics?

Electric power has much to teach us about modem power: it has been constitutive of various political projects and contests in modem history. In the United States, infrastructures of electricity emerged from battles over standardization and ownership, and, by the end of the nineteenth century, such battles had left their mark on the shape of electricity as a commodity. Productions and provisions of electricity were entangled, almost from the outset, in the rise of "managerial capitalism" - as well as of the welfare state: as in many other industries, small or public producers disappeared and electricity service became centralized at the hands of few monopolists, while the government took an active role in regulating the behavior of these companies (Chandler 1977). In the last 25 years of our own, present, moment (roughly

1990-2015), electricity has become the object of another political project: neoliberalism. In the process

of being transformed from a monopoly commodity into a marketplace commodity, electricity has become bound up with the dismantling of managerial capitalism and the welfare state through processes of deregulation' and the construction of competitive markets in the U.S.

Most broadly, this dissertation is a study of economic "emergent forms of life" (Fischer

2003) and "experimental futures" (Fischer 2009). Here, "economic" qualifies any activity that

pertains to the production, circulation, and consumption of objects and services - as handbooks of economic anthropology (e.g., Carrier 2005) and economic sociology (e.g., Smelser and

As I discuss in Chapter 1, "deregulation" is a misnomer: the implied elimination of regulation is not an accurate description of the set of events that has culminated in the construction of markets, as my informants would also attest. Nevertheless, the term is used interchangeably in the industry with the more accurate "restructuring," but I use "deregulation" in this dissertation for the sake of familiarity and consistency.

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Swedburg 2005) usually understand the term.2

Using the methods and theories of anthropology, I here investigate recent remakings of economic existence and modes of disseminating these forms of life, and I do so with particular reference to the crafting of electricity markets in the United States.

The dissertation is thus an ethnographic study of neoliberalism, the emergent economic form of the last 25 years or so, through the lens of contemporary electricity exchange. It draws on more than a year of fieldwork among experts and users involved in electricity exchange. I conducted this fieldwork at disparate locations, including in a Boston-based company called EnTech specializing in collecting and selling information about electricity markets,3

in the electrical engineering department of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, at a hotel in central Massachusetts where ISO-New England, one of the seven electricity markets in the U.S., offered a weeklong market training, and, finally, in West Virginia and rural Illinois, where citizen groups organize against electricity markets' exclusion of consumers from decision-making mechanisms. The experts among whom I conducted participant observation include computer programmers who assist companies that trade in electricity markets by collecting information and making trading suggestions, electrical engineers who design new infrastructures such as electricity markets for buying and selling electricity in bulk, and psychologists and social scientists who study people's electricity consumption behavior to generate economic

technologies to save money to users and providers of electricity. Although I conducted

2 The definition of the "economic" for the discipline of economics has proved less stable over the twentieth century.

Mid-century textbooks of neoclassical fame state that the subject of economics is the "national income" (See Samuelson 1980 [1948], the most iconic economics textbook of the twentieth century). Contemporary textbooks usually begin with a reference to the "choices" a "household," a "person," or a "firm" needs to make - agents considered as individuals in these textbooks (Mankiw 2011 and McConnell et al. 2008 are examples that have reached many editions). The ascent of the "micro" scale in economics is not separate from the ascent of neoliberal economists in economics, discussed briefly below.

' EnTech is a pseudonym that I use to protect the privacy of the employees to whose views I refer in this dissertation. I do not name individuals associated with EnTech.

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interviews (and not participant observation) with a small number of economists, my research focused on computing, engineering, and, to a lesser extent, humanities experts - experts who have had no formal training in the discipline of economics and cursory or no knowledge of the discipline's basics. This is because, as I show throughout this dissertation, it is non-economist experts, experts who specialize in the properties of electricity and the conditions of possibility of the electric infrastructure, who have transformed the exchange of electricity in the recent past and who constantly create new economic forms for users of electricity. The users that I studied are organized activists who protest the neoliberal turn in electricity provision and management and propose alternative economic futures; they are also, perhaps more unsurprisingly than the experts I studied, untrained in economics, computing, or engineering. I demonstrate that people who do not necessarily concern themselves with the formal study of economics often take the

lead in creating and propagating wide-ranging economic "emergent forms of life" across the social field - which, in the case I discuss here, extends through the U.S. To locate why this finding should matter to anthropology, let me begin with a brief explication of what I mean by the concept at the heart of this dissertation: neoliberalism.

The term "neoliberal" was originally limited in scope: it was a word used by a collective of economists that started meeting in the 1930s in central Europe. The founders of this group concerned themselves with reviving the tenets of classical liberalism, such as free trade and

limited government, in an age marked by welfare statism (Collier 2011; Foucault 2008;

Mirowski and Plehwe, eds. 2009). Neoliberal economists were originally marginalized for going against the grain of then-mainstream, neoclassical economics - a discipline concerned with the management of "macro" issues, like inflation and unemployment, by governments. This began to change in the 1970s and 80s in the U.S. and the U.K., when the Ronald Reagan and Margaret

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Thatcher administrations increasingly solicited the collaboration of neoliberal think tanks in bringing about neoliberal economic arrangements in their respective countries and across the world. This political turn is what the most famed critics of neoliberalism focus on: "deregulation, privatization, and withdrawal of the state from many areas of social provision," as geographer

David Harvey puts it (2005: 3).

In accounts like Harvey's, neoliberalism appears as a force - a negative, repressive one (for instance, Harvey speaks of the government's "withdrawal" from the social domain) that moves across the world and causes destruction wherever it goes, largely in the form of the dismantlement of public infrastructures. Anthropologists have pointed out that neoliberalism has become simply synonymous with "evil" in both popular and anthropological accounts, and questioned whether the term has ever been a worthwhile analytic (for a published debate among anthropologists held at the University of Manchester, see Eriksen et al. 2015). Along with those anthropologists and in the fashion of geographers J.K. Gibson-Graham (1996), who have challenged views of capitalism as a monolithic body with a consistent logic, I agree that

"neoliberalism" is not a useful analytic when taken as a finished and consistent set of practices or beliefs. With anthropologist Stephen Collier (2011), I contest a view of neoliberalism as simply government actors' rejection of previously held ethical values or their complete abandonment of the welfare state. Even so, there are productive ways of analyzing neoliberalism, without making it into an actor itself, by following the people who create neoliberal formations in practice and on the ground.

Critics of neoliberalism often point to the transformation of infrastructures, such as those that concretize telecommunications, transportation, incarceration, and others, as the embodiment of the evils of neoliberalism. Harvey speaks of "an unfortunate bias in the path of technological

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change away from production and infrastructure formation into lines required by the market-driven financialization that was the hallmark of neoliberalization" (2005: 157). In these

discussions, infrastructures appear simply as receptacles of governments' international structural adjustment programs that divert funds away from them, privatize, deregulate, or simply neglect them (Collier 2011). On the other hand, as an emerging literature in the anthropology of infrastructures has shown, infrastructures, defined as "matter that enable[s] the movement of other matter" (Larkin 2013: 329), engage nodes of decision-making, contestation, and visions for the future.4 As Stephen Collier finds in his study of post-Soviet infrastructures - one of his examples is heating - services are not simply abandoned in neoliberalism; rather, bureaucrats recode infrastructures in a way that diverts responsibility away from central operators onto a multitude of users. In this way, we can understand the form of neoliberalism not as an

abandonment or rejection of the values of the social state, but as a "form of critical reflection on governmental practice" which is "distinguished by an attempt to reanimate the principles of classical liberalism," such as free enterprise and competition, in a world marked by the rise of the welfare state (Collier 2011: 2). Neoliberalism, then, is a project in reviving the liberal principles of "calculative choice and competition" (Collier 2011: 224) in the contemporary moment.

And "neoliberal," then, qualifies any technique that institutes or expands calculative choice and competition in economic domains where those are non-existent or limited. In this dissertation, I study how experts of computing and engineering recode principles and practices of economic exchange by recoding an infrastructure - the electric grid (more on the analytic of the

4 In Mumbai, for instance, reliable water service is a ground of legal and technical negotiation between citizens, engineers, and bureaucrats, which appears also as a ground of citizenship as redefined through access to

infrastructural services (Anand 2011, Bj6rkman 2015). Similarly, in Nigeria radio networks, mobile cinema units, and cinema theaters constitute privileged venues to understand the transformation of the media infrastructure from colonial into postcolonial, urban, and religious (Larkin 2008).

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"grid" below). To that end, I borrow Collier's concept of "microeconomic devices"5 (2011: 26)

- devices that institute and spread calculative choice and competition. Microeconomic devices range from markets, defined as organized exchanges that meet at preset intervals and mediate multi-party transactions (e.g., the New York Mercantile Exchange), to household appliances such as electricity meters, to more abstract economic instruments such as formulae of variable pricing to generate ever shorter time scales in which traders might compete. In the last 25 years, electricity in the U.S. has increasingly been transmitted not just through wires, but also,

conceptually as well as materially through microeconomic devices - from electricity markets introduced in the early 2000s to in-progress projects like the "smart grid," an electric grid

upgraded with communication and automatic sensing technologies, which, smart grid researchers hope, will bring calculative choice and competition to the homes of virtually everyone in the

U.S. and make active economic actors from every electricity consumer.

Computing and engineering experts that I studied do not set out to change economic systems. Often, they have more modest goals, like designing a pricing formula that will honor both financial contracts signed between parties and electricity's physical laws of transmission. They are steeped in the study of electricity's particularities, interested in such things as how much of it will blow up which wires, how one should go about collecting and storing information about it, and how computer models can be tuned to approximate the prices announced on a given day by market exchanges. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies' (STS) hallmark

attention to humans' entanglement with nonhuman agents in political processes, I propose that

' "Microeconomic devices" are a spin-off of Fabian Muniesa, Yuval Millo, and Michel Callon's "market devices": "the material and discursive assemblages that intervene in the construction of markets" (Muniesa et al. 2007: 2). Collier's "microeconomic device" expands on this concept by including instruments that do not necessarily result in the making of markets yet extend neoliberal principles "in[to] areas where competitive markets could not function"

(2011: 224). 1 find "microeconomic devices" particularly useful to the parts of my study that deal with non-market neoliberal projects such as the smart grid.

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economic assemblages, too, need to be located within this profound entanglement - and often struggle - with electrons, wires, and spreadsheets. Drawing on Timothy Mitchell's "techno-politics" - "an amalgam of both human and nonhuman, things and ideas," a combination of open-ended, "intentional" and "unintended" (2002: 42-43) interactions - I propose

"techno-economics": an approach that understands commodities, whether they are living nonhumans such as livestock or inorganic processes like electricity, as more than passive receptacles of human design, and locates humans within their efforts to commoditize and marketize unruly objects,

like electricity - a commodity that cannot be stored in warehouses or shipped on highways. With techno-economics, we can avoid treating neoliberalism simply as a set of devices

formulated by Euro-American bureaucrats and disseminated to the rest of the world - a holistic evil on which economic suffering around the world can be all-too-easily blamed. Instead, we can uncover neoliberalism as a function of "techne" - craftsmanship, whether the craft concerns managing software, making sure the electric wires do not blow up, or putting price tags on unlikely objects.

What new can one learn about neoliberalism by studying it 1/ in the United States 2/ by focusing on the electricity infrastructure? The neoliberal nature of the American economic order is easy (perhaps too easy) to take for granted for critics like David Harvey.6 Many of the

intellectual foundations of neoliberalism were laid in American institutions and by American economists like Gary Becker (Foucault 2008; Mirowski and Plehwe, eds. 2009); the U.S. hosts the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, two post-war institutions that formulated policies associated with neoliberalism; and the phrase that broadly refers to the global political will to move towards market societies, the Washington Consensus, is named after the capital city of the U.S. I study the U.S., however, precisely to undermine self-evident and

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inevitable understandings of American neoliberalism, often portrayed as a set of practices readily exported internationally through institutions like the IMF and the World Bank. While a number of excellent scholarly accounts (e.g., Collier 2011, Elyachar 2005, Mitchell 2009) focus on neoliberalism as it has played out outside the U.S. but has been affected by the American variant in various ways (e.g., through direct intervention by American political apparatuses, through the influence of American intellectual traditions), I study neoliberalism in one of its presumed epicenters to show that it is far from a completed project, even in the country with which it is most associated. The case of electricity illustrates the unfinished and inconstant nature of neoliberalism, for electricity's neoliberalization started nearly two decades after neoliberal intellectual ideas made their way to mainstream politics under Ronald Reagan's administration.7 Electricity, as a techno-economic field, I will argue, was not simply a receptacle for neoliberal views: it generated neoliberal dynamics of its own as a result of the work of the various actors I discuss below.

I focus on electricity, and the infrastructure made for it to flow through, precisely to draw

attention to the variety of economic actors in play. One could plausibly argue that electricity is a desirable venue to study neoliberalism, because electricity was central to the thinking of the very first self-identified neoliberal economists. Electricity, for the better part of the twentieth century, had been delivered solely by monopolistic companies and priced according to government regulations; it was seen by economists as the epitome of government involvement in regulating the number of competitors and prices in an industry. George Stigler, the first economist to challenge the concept of "natural monopoly" and the necessity of government regulation (then a common theoretical assumption in mainstream, neoclassical, economics) used the regulation of the electricity industry as his case study to argue for the ineffectiveness of the general practice of

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regulation (I discuss Stigler in Chapter 1). Electricity's instrumentality for economists as a "theory machine," an object whose material affordances provide an epistemological

infrastructure for generating a theory (Galison 2003), aside, I argue that electricity's relationship with neoliberalism runs deeper than its relevance to economists, budget planners, and

policymakers. In this dissertation, I show that electrical engineers and computer programmers, who work as grid designers, market designers, analysts, traders, and regulators, serve as the makers and disseminators of microeconomic devices. Studying electricity as a techno-economic field shows that it is people who engage with electricity's physical properties (the fact that electricity cannot be stored in large quantities, shipped through anything but transmission lines, or exported overseas, as distinct from many other commodities) as part of their work and careers (and not ones who use electricity as a case study for otherwise widely applicable ideas), who contribute to neoliberalism more often and significantly. I suggest that the everyday activities of the people I follow are formative of electricity as a neoliberal techno-economic object and also generative of neoliberal forms of exchange for users of electricity.

While electricity markets, smart grids, and other electricity-related microeconomic devices may depend on the passing of laws, the granting of government funds, and voting mechanisms, their production and implementation depend also, and crucially, on forms of engineering and computing expertise, on ways of engaging with electricity that make it transmittable in particular ways - processes that are entangled in electricity's physical particularities and that eschew the possibility of being merely a widely applicable economics

imposed through law and policy. By exploring neoliberalism through a study of electricity, then, one can trace the lateral movements of neoliberal values, produced at the hands of putatively non-economic actors. In Carbon Democracy, Timothy Mitchell (2011) argues that political

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possibilities are simultaneously opened up and closed down when oil flows are assembled in different ways. He follows oil to uncover how U.S. bureaucrats and multinational companies enrolled oil to shut down forms of representative politics, or mass democracy, previously enabled in various ways by an energy system running on coal. In a similar way, I suggest following electricity and tracing its transformations in order to see how they are entangled with and, in some cases, motivate, neoliberalism, as opposed to treating neoliberalism as an a priori starting point,8

as the context within which other phenomena, such as electricity reform (e.g., introduction of competition and deregulation), may take place.9

How can a study of neoliberalism through electricity change what we know about markets, economics, and finance? Markets, as we now know thanks to recent work in

anthropology, are not sites of immediate interactions between self-interested buyers and sellers and the automatic balance of supply and demand. They are relationships of power, mediated through pricing devices that market actors create ( alikan 2010), the mediation of which can

get messy over the years as employees are replaced and institutions grow in size (Lepinay 2011). Markets are held together through traders' personal relationships (Stark and Beunza 2004), ethos and morals (Hertz 1998, Ho 2009), and changing communication mechanisms (Zaloom 2010). Anthropologists' interest in markets does not go back far: economic anthropologists had traditionally directed their attention to what they considered non-market societies outside the

8 What I mean here is similar to what Bruno Latour argues regarding the way the term social came to be understood in the so-called "strong programme" or the "sociology of scientific knowledge" (SSK) in Reassembling the Social (Latour 2005). The social, Latour argues, should not be seen as a preexisting context that influences phenomena in particular ways, but precisely a result of the way phenomena are connected to each other - connections that sociology needs to trace as opposed to simply taking for granted.

9 While studies of how neoliberalism is assembled are rare, neoliberalism appears as contextual force, or an influence originating from the West and inflicted upon (and sometimes challenged by) the global South in a number of anthropological works (e.g. Ferguson 2007; Sawyer 2004).

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West.10 Anthropologists' interest was fueled by the end of state socialisms in the 1990s (Ferguson 2005), the seeming and complete triumph of capitalism across the globe (a view addressed and challenged by J.K. Gibson-Graham 1996, 2006), and the successive financial crises in the U.S., the most recent of which, in 2008, was followed by the Occupy movement

(e.g., Appel 2014, Graeber 2011).

Anthropologists have been inspired by social studies of other domains, which, similarly to markets, have traditionally been left outside the purview of anthropology. Science and technology studies (STS) scholars have proposed studying Western scientific cultures using the ethnographic tools of anthropology (Callon 1986, Latour and Woolgar 1986, Traweek 1988). Michel Callon's (1998) call to study economic models, insofar as they are used as, not simply descriptive, but also prescriptive tools has received significant interest among sociologists and anthropologists who have gone on to ethnographically study how financial theories come to underlie novel market arrangements (e.g., Calikan 2010, MacKenzie 2006, MacKenzie, Muniesa, and Siu 2008). In this dissertation, I agree with the basic insight of Michel Callon about what he has called the "performativity" of economics: that markets, or any other economic arrangement, require expert design and continued intervention in order to be put together and continue functioning. The difference of my contribution to anthropological studies of markets, economics, and finance is that I do not start my account from the assumption that economists, or

'0 Bill Maurer observes (2006) that economic anthropologists and sociologists have long reproduced the plotline of "the great transformation" put forward by Karl Polanyi (1944). Assuming that markets became disembedded from social relations in Western market societies and that state-backed Western money commensurated otherwise incommensurable objects and activities (Simmel 1907), economic anthropologists of the substantivist school have turned their attention to exchange systems thought to be outside market relations and based on reciprocity, redistribution, and subsistence (Bohannan 1959; Dalton 1965; Halperin 1977; Polanyi 1947; Taussig 1980). This view has, ironically, assumed a divide between the so-called market and non-market societies and pushed the study of markets beyond the reach of economic anthropology. Although some scholars have called attention to the embeddedness of economic actions in social relations in industrial societies (Granovetter 1985; Krippner 2001), they have fallen short of fully undermining the presumed divide by assuming a continuum from lesser (market contexts) to greater (non-market contexts) embeddedness.

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any other kind of actors, necessarily alone embody the expertise to make and maintain markets: the case of electricity is rich in many other actors who, by virtue of making electricity

exchangeable or by simply using electricity, become economic actors. In conjunction with my effort not to start with the assumption that neoliberalism is ubiquitous but rather to arrive at how it is made, I propose to follow electricity, as I define it below, as it changes hands, avoiding, along the way, a priori assumptions about who is an economic expert - someone who gives direction to the flows of production, circulation, and consumption in techno-economic assemblages.

The economists specializing in electricity market design whom I interviewed and whose writings I studied did not pretend that markets were self-evident creatures; they did not subscribe to a view that electricity markets would simply emerge if only the laws that organize government regulation of the electricity industry were retracted. Economic sociologists Wendy Espeland and Mitchell Stevens have summarized the view succinctly: "Where markets do not exist they are often invented" (1998: 323). While I agree on this point about the invented nature of markets -a suggestion th-at few contempor-ary schol-ars would deny - in this dissertation I am more interested in the invention of economic actors (i.e., experts and users of electricity) where they may not yet exist and in social roles where one might not expect them to materialize. After all, markets (i.e., organized exchanges that meet at preset intervals and mediate multi-party

transactions) constitute only one kind of microeconomic device among the many that contribute to the making of new forms of subjecthood and social order characterized by calculative choice and competition (Collier 2011: 224). These actors become economic experts through their attempt to put nonhuman forces, such as electricity, in economic circulation, and economic users, to the extent that they actively make buying decisions to partake in this circulation.

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But what exactly does following electricity as an anthropologist or social scientist mean and how is one to do that? There are, of course, many possible ways to chase after electricity. When Benjamin Franklin famously flew a kite in a storm in 1750, he showed that a force occurs between positively and negatively charged bodies - clouds were the objects in which he was

interested - and he proposed that electricity was a matter of the travel of opposing charges, and not a matter of fluid motion in the ether, as had been previously postulated by natural

philosophers (Isaacson 2004: 129-146). The electricity that this dissertation follows is not in Franklin's clouds, though it is not completely unrelated to the sort of electricity produced by lightning either. While a number of phenomena related to electrical charge are considered electricity in physics and electrical engineering, the kind of electricity I discuss is distinguished

by the infrastructure that allows its production, exchange, and use - infrastructure defined as

"matter that enables the movement of other matter" (Larkin 2013: 329), "delivering critical services for human communities and economies" (Carse 2012: 540). The electricity I discuss is a standardized commodity measured in the electricity bills that consumers in the U.S. receive in the mail, commonly called "electricity" and "electric power," or, in engineering terms

"electromagnetic field energy" on which appliances run, priced in kilowatt/hours, delivered in alternating current (AC) at a standardized voltage and frequency." The electricity I discuss is synonymous with electric power, unlike Benjamin Franklin's electricity, since its desirability as a commodity is a function of its ability to power appliances. The experts I studied use these two

" AC became the industry standard in the late nineteenth century after what became known as the "war of currents" between Thomas Edison, who built a DC-based grid in New York, and George Westinghouse, who, with help from Nikola Tesla, built an AC-based grid in the American Midwest (Hughes 1993). Transporting electricity via AC

causes fewer losses during transportation than DC. Although the majority of transmission lines across the world are AC lines, DC is still used, for instance to create weak, emergency-only connections between otherwise separate grids, because DC, as opposed to AC, does not create or require synchrony between the grids it connects.

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terms interchangeably; electricity markets are often referred to as "power markets." For the sake of consistency, I use simply "electricity" in this dissertation.

The electricity that I discuss is a function of the infrastructure through which it moves: therefore, a study of this electricity is necessarily a study of the entirety of the hardware and software equipment that enables electricity's movements - the infrastructure abstractly called

the electric grid by providers, markets, and government offices.1 2

An infrastructure made up of stronger and weaker transmission lines and nodes where these lines intersect and allow the injection of withdrawal of electricity, the electric grid is an amalgam of multiple, overlapping grids. The grid of the continental U.S. is made up of three grids (the Western Interconnection, the Eastern Interconnection, and the Texas Interconnection), each of which maintains

synchronized frequency within itself, which connect to each other through weak bonds - a few direct current (DC) transmission lines to be used only in extreme emergencies. The interconnects are hosts to several grids - this time understood also as economic entities, within which

electricity changes hands according to daily decisions made in transmission-operator-run

markets. One can talk about grids at many, many scales, without necessarily excluding one or the other particular grid, depending on what economic, political, or metallic bonds one chooses to bring into focus.

12 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term "grid" was applied to a number of assemblages that

involved lines and connected objects. The Dictionary cites U.S. and U.K publications from the 1920s and 1930s that refer to an "electric grid" - around when connections between individual nodes, or producers of electricity, started to increase in both countries, resulting in the emergence of "interconnected grids."

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litt:

yI1TtfV. T J

R FCC

Figure 1. The major interconnections in North America. Interconnections are big grids made up of AC lines that maintain frequency synchrony. As can be seen in this map, the interconnections are shared between the U.S. and Canada, but that does not mean that they are governed by across-the board political and economic

rules. Several other grids within interconnections, grids governed by electricity markets, concentrate flows within themselves. As American and Canadian markets are to a large extent separate, electricity flows between the U.S. and Canada are limited. Source: www.energy.gov.

Following electricity through the electric grid, or grids, is a task far from straightforward. Through my fieldwork, as I was hoping to realize exactly that task, I also found myself

constantly tutored in conversations and training sessions with electrical engineers about how electricity was "untraceable" to a source and was always "homogeneous" as it moved through grid space, these were, I was told, electricity's main distinguishing features as a physical

phenomenon and a commodity. "There is no such thing as, say, blue electricity," an engineer and electricity market specialist (Ignacio P6rez-Arriaga, see Chapter 1) often exclaimed in his

classroom while discussing the complete sameness of all electricity injected into the grid - a condition required by the interconnected grid to stay in synchrony. Much like a drop of water in

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the ocean, electricity injected into the grid becomes one with the electricity in the grid, or as he

put it, "You can't say I want my electricity to come from X plant."'

3

Following electricity, however, reveals that its infrastructure does in fact have entry and

exit points. To begin with, following electricity in the U.S. rarely takes one outside of the U.S.

While cotton imported into the U.S. might be traced back to a trading room in Turkey and further

back to a cotton-growing village in Egypt (Cahskan 2010) and while oil imported into the U.S.

might be traced back to drilling privileges gained by multinational companies through episodes

of physical violence in the Middle East (Mitchell 2011) and Africa (Ferguson 2005; Watts 2001),

electricity's circulation occurs in smaller loops owing to electric grids' land-bound character.

Distinct from cotton and oil, production and consumption of electricity are separated only by

seconds and, at most, by mere hundreds of miles (and not thousands as in the case of cotton and

oil), because trade can happen only within the restricted territories of ISOs

-

a feature that

limits the otherwise significant losses incurred by sending electricity farther than a few hundred

miles.

Following electricity takes one to the people who give electricity's movements direction,

who negotiate and disagree over its directions, and who, in short, follow electricity themselves. I

chose to bring my infrastructural study into focus on those venues and actors that are most

influential in giving electricity's movements direction. As I detail below, these are market

designers, traders and analysts, engineering researchers who propose future grids, and citizen

organizations that put forth future alternatives for electricity exchange. In distributed, large

13 Today, select electricity retailers offer their customers the option to pay more for "clean electricity," electricity

produced in power plants that use renewable energy sources. This, however, does not mean that the electricity that choosing customers receive in their homes come exclusively from renewable power plants: instead, it means that the extra amount of money that they pay are allocated to sellers of electricity that comes from renewable power plants. The transaction at issue, then, does not entail control over the movement of electricity, but over the money that changes hands. (This kind of electricity is sometimes also called "green." While Pdrez-Arriaga quips about "no blue electricity" to highlight electricity's homogeneous physicality, the retailers that speak of "green electricity" are at pains to differentiate electricity from electricity - financially, if not physically.)

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infrastructures like the electric grid, it is common for experts to have near exclusive knowledge of their own node. In fact, in each node of my fieldwork, I met people who had only cursory knowledge of my other fieldwork sites. This experience taught me that the electricity

infrastructure is far from a "seamless web" as Thomas Hughes puts it (1986). While the people I studied navigate multiple categories of traditional expertise, as Hughes also argued about the professionals of the electric grid, what they build is not a seamless whole, a "system" with agency of its own and a "technological momentum" that allows it to move forward and evolve over time (Hughes 1993). Rather, I have found that the disconnection among different nodes of an infrastructure often translates into political problems of unequal representation in decision-making mechanisms - such as consumers having no access to processes through which prices are made, or decisions being made in locales where they have no voting privileges. It translates into protests that make the seams of the grid visible and its future far from certain (Chapter 5). It is a strength of anthropological studies of infrastructures, I believe, to highlight such

disconnections in praxis as well as to make connections, in ethnographic representation, among otherwise disparate nodes.

Following electricity points to two key historical junctures of techno-economics in the

U.S. In the early twentieth-century juncture, electricity was organized into a big grid: one that

depended on turning citizens into consumers and operated through the concentration of wealth at the hands of a few producers. In the contemporary moment, electricity flows are becoming the transmitters of neoliberal reflexes, reflexes of calculative choice and competition, at the hands of electrical engineers and computer programmers. In what follows below, I first recapitulate the twin history of electrification and twentieth-century managerial capitalism and then report on the

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contemporary juncture, previewing and summarizing the findings of my ethnographic research. I conclude with a section on my methodology, which includes a chapter outline.

Big Grid: A Brief Economic History of Electrification in the United States1 4

Urban citizens of the U.S., writes historian of electricity David Nye, "encountered electrification in many guises": as spectacle at fairs, as public transportation that reorganized public space, even as a therapeutic substance whose wonders waited to be unlocked (1992: 138). Interestingly, electricity itselfwas not actually originally the principal commodity of the electrical industry: George Westinghouse and other original industrial players made money by selling electricity

production equipment to city governments and industrial manufacturers. The commodity that

changed hands was a material means of production in its own right. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, with Thomas Edison's new business plan, electricity's "many guises" came to be commoditized. Instead of selling production equipment, Edison built a network around his central power station, in order to sell domestic lighting to consumers (Hughes 1993). Edison singled out electricity, the fleeting current, as a useful commodity that changed hands, ushering in the era of electricity as we know it.

From the very beginning, electricity has been a site of techno-economics - a site where economic relationships and technological developments emerged in conjunction, where

technological expertise and economic expertise became an inextricable alloy. Electricity, as it came to be in Edison's network, was not a commodity for which contemporary political

economists had a straightforward account. Understanding electricity as a commodity took work. Look back to Karl Marx's Capital, which employed cotton to illustrate how commodities gain

" With "big grid," I draw on the term "big data" - I do so anachronistically to invoke an ultimately desirable

expansion that comes with operation and management problems. For kindred definitions of "big data," see Gitelman ed. (2013).

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exchange value (1977 [1867]: 293-302). Or consider Alfred Marshall, the pioneer of neoclassical economics, who spoke of knives in a footnote of The Principles ofEconomics, and famously

forwarded the first graphic representation of the supply and demand curve (1890: 432). Useful objects such as cotton and knives helped reinforce the notion that production and consumption, as well as supply and demand, were separate forces that would interact over time until

equilibrium between the two could be reached. Such commodities could wait in a warehouse while producers and consumers rethought their buying and selling decisions. In the case of electricity, however - even to this day - the time window to establish equilibrium is limited to seconds; that is the temporality that is enacted in keeping the electric grid intact and functioning.

If the removal of supply (e.g., as a result of a tripped power station) is too sudden, blackouts can

occur near and far; similarly, transmission lines can fail or blow up if they are subjected to more power than their carrying limit allows.

There is no evidence that the commoditization of electricity prompted economists (or economic anthropologists) to rethink their assumptions about how supply and demand reach equilibrium conditions in the world. Yet, interestingly, the topic commanded the attention of electrical engineers from the very beginning of electrification. Building on his earlier experience with telegraphy engineering, Edison devised electromagnetic devices - regulators and exciters

-that stabilized minor deviations from standard supply (Hughes 1992: 43). In his centrally orchestrated system there was only one source of supply and, with a known number of light bulbs (around 10,000), forecasting demand (or "load" in electrical parlance) was not a major problem. By the early twentieth century, however, small grids, run by individual small utilities were increasingly being integrated into big grids by way of mergers and purchases, connecting different kinds of power stations, and carrying alternating current across long distances. The

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poorly understood dynamics of this integration resulted in power surges in transmission lines and frequent blackouts, attracting the attention of the emergent electricity industry and newly

emerging electrical engineering departments (Mindell 2004: 144)."

The network that Thomas Edison built was defended legally by a set of patents and public relations efforts. One particularly spectacular public relations stunt involved publically electrocuting animals with alternating current, a form of electricity (due to Tesla) that was locked in competition with Edison's direct current. Edison's network was built to expand: because the profit came from small consumers, it would only become profitable if electricity became an "obligatory passage point" (Callon 1986) for daily household tasks and more and more citizens were convinced to plug in. Network-building efforts similar to the construction of the electric grid were changing the face of capitalism in the late nineteenth century. Companies that sold other network commodities, such as railroad service and electric telegraphy, were developing complex managerial hierarchies to organize the flows of these goods (Chandler 1984). Companies in other industries followed: enrolling transportation, communications, and electricity-enabled workplace technologies like the assembly line, they combined under their roofs various production and distribution tasks that used to be provided by small, single-purpose companies in an earlier era of capitalism. Vertically integrated companies like electric utilities

15 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) electrical engineering professor Harold. Hazen saw first-hand the

challenges of maintaining system stability, having worked in the 1920s on General Electric's 500-mile transmission line between Quebec and New York. Hazen compared its operation to the "towing of one car by another with a long elastic cable stretched almost to the breaking point. Under these conditions, any mishap, such as a short circuit or a sudden adding of load, would in effect snap the towing cable" (Hazen quoted in Mindell 2004: 151). At MIT's electrical engineering department, Hazen, under the supervision of Vannevar Bush and in collaboration with mathematicians Norbert Wiener and Claude Shannon, led the building of the network analyzer, an analog computer that modeled the electric grid for researchers to study the stability of voltage and frequency as different sources of alternating current interact. The mechanical calculators built to analyze the electric grid were then turned into general-purpose machines open to the use of other scientists and engineers on campus. During the wartime and after, engineers and mathematicians of the electric grid, like Hazen, deduced general theories for feedback, control, and computing from their studies, which would later obscure their roots in the study of the electric grid (Mindell 2004).

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initiated mass production and mass distribution services, incorporating into their operations tasks previously fulfilled through market coordination amongst many competitors.

The electricity industry was not merely an example of managerial capitalism: it contributed to its very rise in significant ways. As the case of Samuel Insull shows, electricity

industrialists produced economic theory and contributed to the mainstream of economics in their endeavor to advance the big grid. Insull - an Englishman who was originally a protegd of Edison and later the head of a small electric utility in Chicago - was able to build an empire, Commonwealth Edison, which swallowed all but a few competitors in the Chicago area, by mobilizing an old economic argument, the "natural monopoly." According to John Stuart Mill's mid-nineteenth century writings on political economy, in industries with large starting costs and large demand, only one firm could meet demand in a given territory while continuing a profitable existence (e.g., Seavoy 2006: 269-271). To legitimize his claims to monopoly, Insull created demand for electricity by investing heavily in research on electrical appliances.16 Insull

mobilized Mill's argument to persuade state politicians, to whose campaigns he had financially contributed, asking for exemptions from antitrust laws and for the right to the exclusive use of the electric grid. To the shock of American industrialists supporting ideals of free enterprise and competition, he announced his advocacy for state regulations that would allow monopolistic activity (McDonald 1958). The notion of a "natural monopoly" made it into neoclassical

economics textbooks as fact only in the mid-twentieth century (Mosca 2008), decades after Insull had successfully if controversially introduced it as the economic justification for his

network-building.

16 For instance, home economists knocked on doors to tell women that good homemaking depended on using

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Insull contributed to the creation of a world in which his (borrowed) economic theory became a fact. While Callon's argument about performativity might well support this

observation, I want also to emphasize that the materialization of economic theories emerges from material entanglements with nonhumans in the techno-economic field. Edison and Insull's cases demonstrate that building the "big grid" order of managerial capitalism required connecting economic calculations with patents, public spectacles, and standardized voltage levels, along with the copper and steel of electric wires. The entanglement with these nonhumans complicates Callon's notion of performativity: between economic theories and economic facts, there is an arduous process controlled largely by people, who are not necessarily conversant with economics, but with the properties of the commodities and infrastructures that they try to

marketize. Bringing nonhuman agents into the economic picture also allows us to see the work of experts, such as those in computing and engineering, whose practices have been largely

unsuspected by scholars drawing on Callon's performativity. Let me now segue from Insull's empire to a second, contemporary, techno-economic juncture in the history of electricity.

While vertically integrated corporations met resistance from public forces and the federal government up until World War Two,'7 in the postwar period, when Keynesian welfarism and the social state became conventional wisdom, the federal government made peace with corporations. The government became a customer of corporations as part of its commitment to maintain full employment and high aggregate demand (Chandler 1977). Managerial capitalism seemed largely unchallenged; natural monopoly became canon in both neoclassical economics

17 When Insull lost his empire during the Great Depression, he was brought to court for charges of corruption and

unjustifiably high rates. Even though he was acquitted, he became a notorious early figure of corporate greed. Orson Welles notes that he drew inspiration for Citizen Kane from "his Chicago days" and Samuel Insull. See Welles (1998: 49). It is probably no coincidence that Franklin Roosevelt was an outspoken critic of the electricity industry when he was elected and that he passed a law that limited the growth of utilities two years after his election (Rudolph and Ridley 1986).

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and industry. That is, until a number of developments made a rival techno-economic project, neoliberalism, viable in the political arena.

One day in the early 1980s, two Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) economists who studied electric utilities were chatting with officials from the Reagan administration at the White House. Seemingly out of nowhere, the officials solicited the economists' opinion, "Why don't we just deregulate electric utilities?" Following conventional wisdom in their discipline, the two economists were flabbergasted at the suggestion. "There's only one set of wires: you can't have competing wires!" they thought.'8 A decade later, however, in 1992, with the passing

of the Energy Policy Act, the deregulatory process had begun:19

since that time, individual states have been able to pass laws to disassemble monopolies and enable new competitors to join the industry. In 1996, the process was taken a step further when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) invented a number of novel concepts. Regional Transmission Operators (RTOs) or Independent System Operators (ISOs) were defined by the FERC as entities that would be non-profit transmission operators. (The legal difference between RTOs and ISOs is negligible: the experts I study often use the terms interchangeably, although they more often use

"ISO" [as I do as well in this dissertation].) The point in creating ISOs was opening up the

electric grid, the sole route for electricity to be shipped, to the use of every new firm willing to buy or sell electricity. FERC thus hoped to jump start competition. Especially since the 1960s, when the first major blackout of the U.S. took place (Nye 2010), it had been customary for individual utilities to form alliances to share their service areas as a bulwark against their

18 This anecdote comes from my interview with one of those two economists, Richard Schmalensee. See Chapter 1.

19 The word "deregulation" is a clear misnomer, since the introduction of competition and market structures almost always entails more regulation. Instead of the literally accurate "restructuring," I retain "deregulation" here, because it is generally more familiar. My interlocutors use the two terms interchangeably and do not necessarily refer to the elimination of regulation as "deregulation."

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individual failures. Formerly known as "power pools," these organizations started applying to FERC to become approved as ISOs.

The other major concept that FERC created was electricity markets. According to FERC's definition, these markets were computational processes to be run by ISOs. The

individual participants were to submit bids and offers to buy and sell electricity for every preset interval (usually every day) and prices binding for every participant would be announced at a preset time before that interval. The first electricity market came into existence in California in

1998, and today there are seven across the country, each with hundreds of generators (producers

and sellers of electricity) and utilities (buyers of electricity on behalf of consumers) as participants. While consumers and producers hundreds of miles apart still find themselves connected in big grids, the operations of these grids are now arranged to minimize central planning and accommodate distributed buying and selling decisions.

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Elaticty systoem Operator R Engand Now Vt) SO C) (ISONEI (CMU)j 4....REGIONAL TRANSMISSION ORGANIZATIONS E...dko vii. 2014

Figure 2. There are seven transmission operators in the U.S., each of which operates an electricity market. Source: www.ferc.gov.

What happened between that conversation in the early 1980s and the beginning of a neoliberal order in electricity, again, can best be analyzed as a techno-economic process and project. My interviews with economists and electrical engineers who produced financial mechanisms to govern competition in electricity reveal that economists and engineers collaborated to combine what they each knew best: marginal-cost pricing, a theory according to which a good's market price equals the cost of producing one more unit of it in perfectly competitive markets, and the physics of electricity transmission. Over the 1980s, an MIT group led by an electrical engineer

professor designed an algorithm to assign different prices to electricity at different nodes. Through this algorithm, prices would accomplish what they were supposed to accomplish in a perfectly competitive electricity market: reflect the spatially varying costs of injecting and

Figure

Figure  1.  The  major interconnections  in North  America.  Interconnections  are  big  grids made  up of AC  lines that  maintain  frequency  synchrony
Figure  2.  There  are  seven  transmission operators  in the  U.S.,  each  of which  operates  an  electricity  market.
Figure  2.  Snapshot  of the  thernal  map  of real-time  LMPs  taken on 21  April  2014  at 07:35  PM
Figure  3.  A  snapshot  from  one  of PJM's  publicly  available equipment  list  documents

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