The success and failure of combined heat and power (CHP) in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands: Revisiting Stewart Russell's perspective on technology choices in Society

Abstract

Stewart Russell's research work on combined heat and power/district heating (CHP/DH) in the UK was among the first empirical contributions to demonstrate that technological change is not just determined by seemingly objective technical and economic performance characteristics, but rather the result of social choices. His rich conceptual thinking is reconstructed in a coherent framework, and its explanatory power explored by analysing the innovation diffusion paradox of CHP/DH: in spite of very similar technical and economic characteristics, the patterns of innovation and diffusion differ significantly across countries. To this end, the evolution of CHP/DH in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands is compared. Russell's ideas can be regarded as a predecessor of recent multi-level approaches to the analysis of socio-technical change. He put much emphasis on studying power relations for explaining the (non-) occurrence of socio-technical change; an issue that is still debated today.