1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910808941003321

Autore

Özden-Schilling Canay

Titolo

The current economy : electricity markets and techno-economics / / Canay Özden-Schilling

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Stanford, California : , : Stanford University Press, , [2021]

©2021

ISBN

1-5036-2822-1

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (224 p.)

Disciplina

333.79320973

Soggetti

Expertise - Economic aspects - United States

Markets - Social aspects - United States

Electric utilities - United States

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1 Regulating -- 2 Representing -- 3 Optimizing -- 4 Protesting -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

Electricity is a quirky commodity: more often than not, it cannot be stored, easily transported, or imported from overseas. Before lighting up our homes, it changes hands through specialized electricity markets that rely on engineering expertise to trade competitively while respecting the physical requirements of the electric grid. The Current Economy is an ethnography of electricity markets in the United States that shows the heterogenous and technologically inflected nature of economic expertise today. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among market data analysts, electric grid engineers, and citizen activists, this book provides a deep dive into the convoluted economy of electricity and its reverberations throughout daily life. Canay Özden-Schilling argues that many of the economic formations in everyday life come from work cultures rarely suspected of doing economic work: cultures of science, technology, and engineering that often do not have a claim to economic theory or practice, yet nonetheless dictate forms of economic activity. Contributing to economic anthropology, science and technology studies, energy studies, and the anthropology of expertise,



this book is a map of the everyday infrastructures of economy and energy into which we are plugged as denizens of a technological world.