Test, Rinse, Repeat: How to Keep Remaking a Testbed Until It Holds

• In Event: Co-creating or Testing Scalable Societies? Test Beds and Living Labs as Emerging Innovation Policy Instruments - II

Abstract

This paper traces the shifting visions and actor alliances based at the European Energy Forum (Euref), an urban energy and mobility testbed, in Berlin between 2007 and 2015. I will examine how different energy futures have been negotiated and materialized in a testbed setting, while the political and technological expectations around it kept changing. My analysis suggests that the Euref’s actor coalition secured its niche not through successful experimentation but repeated realignment with different sociotechnical imaginaries and unexpected events at key moments of its development. Before Euref could become the “symbol of the turnaround in energy policy,” as which it portrays itself today, it went through three distinct phases from its inception in the mid-2000s to its long-term stabilization at the end of 2015. While the envisioned “miniature society” of the testbed kept mutating, the Euref emerged as a distinct force in the German energy transition. “Mobility2Grid,” the envisioned technical system to-be-tested, remained elusive, which made it even more crucial to the alignment process, as it allowed the Euref consortium to incorporate or—if necessary—abandon allies, technological trends, and fading narratives. The notion of an ideal testbed suggests a need for stability and continuity with regard to technology implementation, envisioned future, and involved actors. I argue that this relationship works the other way around as well. Testbeds can keep legitimacy of the larger arrangement intact while technologies deviate, visions change, and alliances reform repeatedly.

Author

• Alexander Wentland, Technical University of Munich