When Systems are Overthrown

Abstract

The privatization of the British electricity supply industry (ESI) in the late 1980s and early 1990s was associated with a transformation in electricity generation technology. In a sudden and unexpected `dash for gas', previously unused combined cycle gas turbine plant was adopted for all new large power stations. Gas turbine technology, politically and institutionally excluded from the industry before privatization, gained ascendancy due to the coincidence and interaction of ESI liberalization with lower fuel prices and greater availability, improved turbine performance, pollution abatement legislation, and the manifestation of institutional tensions accumulated under nationalization.

An earlier paper found that the demise of established generation technology, particularly the British nuclear power programme, exposed the inadequacies of autonomistic and deterministic notions of technological change. The present paper considers the value of a more subtle framework - Hughes' sociotechnical systems model - for analysing the rise of gas turbines in the British ESI. The systems perspective enables the dash for gas to be understood, rather than as a result of technical and economic imperatives, or structural and regulatory reform, as a contingent and largely unplanned outcome of the interplay of previously excluded international forces with latent local interests, mediated by policymaking expediency. Liberalization swiftly led to the replacement of centralized system building with fragmented `postmodern' change.