Current Situation

Electricity is ordinary. The denizens of the fully electrified world tend to take its continued presence for granted and are startled by moments of its interruption, like blackouts or brownouts.

But electricity is also extraordinary, and not only because, over the course of less than a century and a half within its introduction, it has had a transformative effect on how social life is experienced in urban spaces and households. Electricity is an extraordinary commodity - not one to be used in economics textbooks to demonstrate the purported laws of supply and demand.

Electricity is a quirky commodity: more often than not, it cannot be stored, easily transported or imported from overseas. Before lighting up our homes, it changes hands through specialised electricity markets that rely on engineering expertise to trade competitively while respecting the physical requirements of the electric grid.


The Current Economy is an ethnography of electricity markets in the US that shows the heterogeneous and technologically inflected nature of economic expertise today.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork among market data analysts, electric grid engineers and citizen activists, this book provides a deep dive into the convoluted economy of electricity and its reverberations throughout daily life....

From "The Current Economy: Electricity Markets and Techno-Economics"