Securing Vital Power Against Uncertainties
Standards and Standardisation,
Forecasting, and Training
as Power Grid Security Techniques

Abstract

Modern societies depend on a stable and uninterrupted electricity supply. Power grids function as infrastructural life-support systems. Their complexity, interdependence, and tight coupling generate systemic uncertainty: failures can occur unexpectedly and escalate rapidly, while every security intervention can reflexively be either excessive or insufficient. Blackouts are rarely caused by a single discrete event, but rather by cascading failures within a stressed system. Securing the grid, then, means intervening before uncertainty materialises into a potential catastrophe.

This thesis investigates how security is enacted in the German electricity transmission system. Yet the interconnected grid and its security defy national boundaries. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork with a Transmission System Operator (TSO) and a regional security coordinator (RSC), it examines how everyday operations contain, reduce and manage uncertainty. The study focuses on three key security techniques—standards and standardisation, forecasting, and training—which each target distinct uncertainties and futures. The aim is to understand how security emerges not from eliminating threats, but from rendering uncertainties actionable through technical and embodied routines.

The analysis demonstrates how standards rely on imagined futures to inform present actions, how forecasting models generate probabilistic predictions of grid behaviour, and how training creates uncertainty managers. These techniques do not operate in isolation. Their layered application constitutes a form of anticipatory security that manages uncertainty across spatial and temporal scales. Power grid security, the thesis argues, is not reactive but generative: it creates, includes and excludes specific futures.

The thesis contributes to Critical Security Studies by theorising power grid security as a form of everyday biopolitics. It shows how infrastructures are made secure through mundane yet vital forms of labour that modulate uncertainty, rather than eliminate it. These findings have broader implications for understanding how security is enacted in other infrastructural systems shaped by complexity, interdependence, and systemic uncertainty.