Renewables: common pool natural resources ‒ distributed generation in intelligent grids

The current trend in our power supply system is to shift power generation towards much smaller energy conversion units: DGRS ‒ Distributed Generation using Renewable Sources. Traditional power plants are large centralised units, primarily fuelled by coal and oil, natural gas, nuclear fission and large hydro-power stations. These are deeply institutionalized socio-technical systems (STS), but the future perspective of this STS needs upgrading, as current systems are run by “big unwieldy corporate machines” whose change is “characterized by recalcitrance and torpor” (Bakke, 2016, p.xx). The adjacent consequences of the emergence of DGRS requires far reaching re-organization of the STS, that implies significant institutional changes moving away from centralized and hierarchical management (Wolsink, 2018).