Instrumenting Sustainability Transitions, Calibrating Marine Energy Futures

• In Event: More Instrument than Data: Attuning to the Apparatus - I

Abstract

In order for instruments to produce data that can be carried through time and across scales, they must be calibrated with one another. During this process, they are both subject to and reproduce standards. Using the example of a network of marine renewable energy testing and demonstration sites in Scotland, I examine the creation, calibration, and standardization of these assemblages of instruments. These wave and tidal technology testing facilities have been created to help fuel an “accelerated energy transition.” Institutions at EU, national, and regional scales are funding and facilitating standardization and certification schemes that serve to calibrate these testing facilities and create meaningful or “bankable” metrics for performance and testing of marine energy devices. Through interviews and participatory observation, this paper brings this calibration work into conversation with literature on instruments and instrumenting in order to understand how this knowledge work not only helps build research infrastructures that allow measurements to travel from local to global, but in doing so, traces how these calibration practices bring energy futures and imaginaries into being.

Author

• Shana Lee Hirsch, University of Washington