Green Electricity Markets? Constructed Realities, Prosumerism and Solar PV

Solar Photovoltaics (PV) on individual rooftops are a potentially revolutionary form of electricity generation. This paper critically analyses this potential in light of key debates on the impact of solar PV on the existing electricity market in Australia. These debates draw on electricity supply norms of reliability, accessibility and affordability together with a meta-norm of competition within liberalised markets. Certainly costs of this technology are declining rapidly yet the implications of solar PV on electricity go further. Further, neo-liberal reforms to electricity markets create opportunities for proponents to argue that solar PV can reduce the price of electricity to all, not just those with PV panels on their rooves. Not surprisingly these arguments have been subject to intense debate, with critics not only questioning these economic benefits of solar PV, but also appealing to social norms arguing that solar PV provides unreliable (intermittent) power that benefits the wealthy at the expense of the poor. Yet both sides of the argument may need to take greater account of new norms introduced into the market as PV transforms individual household orientation to the market from consumers to prosumers who both produce and consume electricity. A prosumerist sensibility together with technological advances suggests that solar PV has the potential to destabilise existing electricity markets, its associated norms and hence the interests of incumbent businesses