We need more network capacity! But why do we get it? Infrastructural refraction and the contingencies of network growth and energy transitions
本文提出“基础设施折射”概念，研究电力网络容量增长的渐进性及其对能源转型的影响，通过曼谷33千伏变电站案例揭示投资的历史和地理偶然性。
It is accepted that electricity networks need to grow in scale and scope to facilitate decarbonisation. It is also accepted that infrastructural change is incremental. Yet, the incremental delivery of network capacity and the relevance of this for energy transitions have received little attention. Instead, broader, evolutionary accounts of change predominate. Opportunities therefore remain to conceptualise and study the incrementality of network growth and to consider the implications of this for energy transitions. I conceptualise investment in network capacity as an outcome of infrastructural refraction: as emergent of varied and unevenly distributed histories and geographies of electrification beaming through and being refracted by the prism of socio-technical infrastructure in ways that condition the sited reconstitution of network capacities. Examining practices of translation, enacted by network operators, provides a method of revealing the constitutive details and dynamic of infrastructural refraction. A case study focused on the technological framing of the delivery of a 33 kV substation in Central Manchester is explored. The analysis stresses the importance of examining the contingencies of investment in capacity. This paper contributes a concept-method package that helps reveal such details and by proxy the polycentric politics of electrification, investment in electricity network capacity, and energy transitions. • Infrastructural refraction is presented as a means of conceptualising investment in electricity network capacity. • Investment in network capacity is seen as historically and geographically contingent. • The contingencies of network growth provide insight into the polycentric politics of energy transitions. • These politics reveal the varied socio-technical histories and geographies of energy transitions and ends served.