Article ID: CBB043986489

The Backbone: Construction of a Regional Electricity Grid in the Arabian Peninsula (2018)

unapi

This article studies the production of a power grid across six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, known as ‘the backbone,’ which has been conceptualized as an answer to power outages. First it analyzes how experts working with and around the GCC Interconnection Authority (GCCIA) advance claims to a regional territorial imagination. Second, it shows that the construction of the grid not only indicates a shift in the material arrangement of wires and substations, but also necessitates new understandings of transparency and a new formula for the electricity price, facilitating the cutting of government subsidies along with additional price increases. Third, it interrogates how electricity is consumed in the region. Policy-makers expected that electricity price increases would lead to lower rates of consumption. Yet after price hikes were instituted, analysts reported how they had no impact. Users behaved in ways that the grid’s engineers did not anticipate. Overall the article shows how various actors conduct ‘boundary work,’ that is, how they set limits between the political, the financial and the technical while producing the backbone. The article explores how this boundary work helps stabilize a particular sociotechnical imaginary of energy security in the GCC, masking anxieties associated with a future beyond oil.

...More
Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB043986489/

Similar Citations

Article Tatiana Acevedo-Guerrero; (2019)
Light is like water: Flooding, blackouts, and the state in Barranquilla (/isis/citation/CBB476051463/)

Article Michael Clormann; Nina Klimburg-Witjes; (2022)
Troubled Orbits and Earthly Concerns: Space Debris as a Boundary Infrastructure (/isis/citation/CBB293656345/)

Article Elina I. Mäkinen; (March 2018)
Action in the Space Between: From Latent to Active Boundaries (/isis/citation/CBB718195671/)

Article Guus Dix; (April 2019)
Microeconomic forecasting: Constructing commensurable futures of educational reforms (/isis/citation/CBB842460109/)

Article Norma Möllers; (January 2021)
Making Digital Territory: Cybersecurity, Techno-nationalism, and the Moral Boundaries of the State (/isis/citation/CBB777052436/)

Article Albert Munoz; (December 2019)
Microgrids for Disaster Management: An Ethical Risk Perspective (/isis/citation/CBB644178097/)

Article Breslau, Daniel; (December 2013)
Designing a market-like entity: Economics in the politics of market formation (/isis/citation/CBB008203841/)

Article Efrain O'Neill-Carrillo; Emmanuel Mercado; Oscar Luhring; Isaac Jordan; Agustin Irizarry-Rivera; (September 2019)
Community Energy Projects in the Caribbean: Advancing Socio-Economic Development and Energy Transitions (/isis/citation/CBB741220720/)

Article Pia Vuolanto; Marjo Kolehmainen; (July 2021)
Gendered Boundary-work within the Finnish Skepticism Movement (/isis/citation/CBB137850505/)

Article Suryanarayanan, Sainath; Daniel Lee Kleinman. Daniel Lee; (April 2013)
Be(e)coming experts: The controversy over insecticides in the honey bee colony collapse disorder (/isis/citation/CBB096871778/)

Article Sky Edith Gross; Shai Lavi; Hagai Boas; (2019)
Medicine, Technology, and Religion Reconsidered: The Case of Brain Death Definition in Israel (/isis/citation/CBB228629534/)

Article Durant, Darrin; (October 2011)
Models of democracy in social studies of science (/isis/citation/CBB562394056/)

Article Logan D. A. Williams; Sharlissa Moore; (2019)
Guest Editorial: Conceptualizing Justice and Counter-Expertise (/isis/citation/CBB521476031/)

Article Lagendijk, Vincent; Vleuten, Erik van der; (April 2010)
Transnational infrastructure vulnerability: The historical shaping of the 2006 European blackout (/isis/citation/CBB001180972/)

Article Ana Cardoso de Matos; (2011)
Urban gas and electricity networks in Portugal: competition and collaboration (1850–1926) (/isis/citation/CBB353307681/)

Article Hilary Brown; (June 2018)
Keeping the Lights On: A Comparison of Normal Accidents and High Reliability Organizations (/isis/citation/CBB642439933/)

Article Caroline White-Nockleby; (2022)
Grid-scale batteries and the politics of storage (/isis/citation/CBB962097904/)

Authors & Contributors
Suryanarayanan, Sainath
Pia Vuolanto
Norma Möllers
Nina Klimburg-Witjes
Hilary Brown
Caroline White-Nockleby
Concepts
Technoscience; science and technology studies
Expertise
Electricity and Electrical Power
Infrastructure
Boundary work
Sociotechnical systems
Time Periods
21st century
20th century
Modern
20th century, late
19th century
Places
Virgin Islands (U.S.)
Barranquilla
Detroit (Michigan)
Puerto Rico
Colombia
United States
Institutions
Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment