Economy Electric: Transmitting Electricity and Economic Forms of Life in the United States

In the United States, electricity has been sold as a commodity since the late 19th century and transmitted through large, integrated grids since the 1920s. Today, more and more electricity is bought and sold in seven competitive electricity exchanges before being delivered to consumers. Based on ethnographic fieldwork across the electric grid of the US, this talk explores who is behind the marketization of the electric grid, how our electric environment is being rearranged to make way for market relationships, and what kinds of differences marketization makes in the daily lives of electricity users.