What is a smart grid?

The Indian Smart Grid Forum defines a smart grid as "a power system capable of two-way communication between all the entities of the network-generation, transmission, distribution and the consumers". Like most work on smart grids, this view is also mainly technical. This paper aims to progress the thinking on smart grids from a predominantly technical one to a socio technical one. It seeks to conceptualise a socio technical smart grid. Based on interviews, project visits and document analysis related to smart grids in India and using Annemarie Mol's (2002) analytical repertoire, the paper argues that a smart grid is not one but a 'grid multiple'. The 'grid multiple' manifests in two ways. First, a smart grid is formed not just by solar panels, light bulbs, meters, ICT's bound together by wires. It is interwoven together with a social grid, a financial grid and a governmental grid. Together they conceive, modify, use, disuse and reproduce the smart grid. A smart grid is not one grid but a coming together and hanging together, often tenuously, of multiple grids. Second, a smart grid "turns up in different forms in different places" (Law 2009). Following, Mol (2002), we argue that there are different practices of smart grids which lead to different material realities. These different material realities are also produced by the dissimilarities in the various grids that come together to form a smart grid and through the dissimilar ways in which the social, financial and governmental coordinate with each other.