Smart grids: A multi-scale framework of analysis

Smart-grids are currently of great social and scientific interest. For certain social actors, they have generated a great deal of expectation. There are several aspects to take into account when advocating for a universal implementation of smart-grids. Here we concentrate in their possibilities regarding the co-evolution between technical integration and social interaction. We propose a framework to analyze the compromise between technical and economic efficiency on one hand and citizen participation on the other, which goes from the individual scale (a household) to the society level. In order to explore to what degree individual decisions and emergent cooperation could be coordinated with centralized decision making when the latter may imply higher technological efficiency, we analyze several case studies within the framework and explore the possibility of arriving at a power “ecosystem”.