Engineering Markets for Control: Integrating Wind Power into the Danish Electricity System

The present study involves an inquiry into the making of a Danish energy system based on renewable energy sources. Focusing specifically on one of the major barriers to the introduction of renewable energy sources known as the intermittency problem, emphasis is put on how fluctuating electricity generation from wind turbines has been integrated into the Danish electricity system. The study focuses on the ways in which the integration of wind power in Denmark has involved the introduction and reconfiguration of a series electricity markets known as Nord Pool. Significantly, these electricity markets are engineered as control arrangements for electricity system equilibrium maintenance. When attempting to integrate wind power into the Danish electricity system by introducing or reconfiguring these control system market arrangements, metrics from economics are used to describe the ideal outcome or objective to be attained through market construction. Coupling these empirical observations with a line of inquiry concentrating on the use of knowledge, skills, and know-how in market design and management associated with the ‘performativity programme’ in the social and human sciences and especially economic sociology the thesis is framed by the following research question: How have control systems engineering and economics been mobilized in the endeavor to integrate wind power into the Danish electricity system through electricity market design and management? Answering this research question involves an analysis of three different instances of electricity market construction. All three cases demonstrate how integrating wind power into the Danish electricity system has been approached as a matter of electricity market construction increasing the capacity of Nord Pool to exert control and maintain equilibrium in the electricity system. In addition to producing insights into how the intermittency problem is being handled in Denmark, the present study seeks to augment the performativity programme in two ways. One way is to show how control systems engineering, being an understudied form of expertise within the performativity programme, has played a crucial role in the design and management of a series of markets. The other is to show how economics, being a form of expertise studied extensively by the members of the performativity programme in other empirical settings, has had heretofore undescribed functions in market design and management.