Just plug in the holy grail? The envisioning process of large-scale energy storage in the Netherlands

Large-scale energy storage is a novel and relatively fast-growing technology with the potential to exert a considerable impact on our energy system and society as a whole. At this moment, stakeholders of this technology are creating visions on the form, the application, and the societal impact of large-scale energy storage. These images of the future serve important functions as they mobilize resources, create incentives, formulate goals, specify relevant actors, and allocate roles. Prominent actors emphasize that large-scale energy storage is 'the holy grail', 'something that it’s going to be huge', 'THE technology needed to realize a sustainable energy grid'. However, at the same time, these actors express the importance of 'plugging it into the present system', 'minimizing resistance', and 'something that is not yet a point of discussion'. There seems to be a friction between the imagined prominent position of this technology and the needed deliberative change embedded in emerging visions to accelerate the desired transition. To advance our understanding of the function of visions within social-technical transitions, this paper examines the early dynamics in the envisioning process regarding the emerging technology of large-scale energy storage in the Netherlands. The analysis focuses on deconstructing the emerging visions in terms of their illustrative problem, imagine future, driving ideologies, radicalism, and embedded storylines. Data is collected through 30 semi-structured interviews with a variety of stakeholders in the energy storage community. The paper argues that stakeholders who promote and develop large-scale energy storage downplay the societal impact this technology will have, stressing its incremental nature. Visualizing the absence of conflict and depoliticizing the issue to merely a technical question might be a deliberative effort to close off the visualization process. While understandable from the perspective of trying to minimize societal resistance, this way of envisioning the technologies future may also adversely impede the technologies success in creating the sustainable future it so hopes to accomplish. After all, it is hard to enthuse, convince and mobilize the public enough to realize a radically different future within an envisioning process downplaying its own radical potential. The paper contributes to current work in the field of social-technical studies on new ways of understanding the process of envisioning, going beyond ex-post descriptions of imagined futures. In doing so, this research aims to contribute to the literature on the role of visions for technological innovations within social-technical transitions.