The digital revolution of the energy system promises a new sustainable energy future, but risks security and privacy. How to balance or at least compare these risks against other values like more sustainability is far from obvious and poses severe challenges for the orientation knowledge of technology assessment (TA). This paper explores the Capability Approach (CA) as a normative orientation for TA that allows addressing these challenges. We use two scenarios for the current digitalization in the energy sector as case studies.

Smart grid systems are considered an important enabler in the transition to more sustainable energy systems. However, societal concerns with these emerging technologies reflect core moral and social values such as privacy, security, or justice. In this paper, we conduct a qualitative content analysis to explore the broad range of values underlying arguments used in the public debate on smart grid systems in the Netherlands. Our results show that publicly available documents contain value-laden statements suitable to derive values and their relevance to different societal groups. A wide range of values underlie arguments pro and contra smart energy systems in the Dutch public debate. Our findings provide a basis for including social and moral dimensions into system design and balance value concerns with the goal to achieve a more sustainable energy system both from a political and a technological perspective.

In this chapter we identify three practice turns in the social and philosophical study of technology that we also relate to risk analysis. The first practice turn singled out technology as a topic meriting serious investigation as a social phenomenon, the second turn steered the field towards the consideration of philosophical problems directly relating to what technology is and what engineers do. The third practice turn explicitly aims at changing the field’s practice by close collaboration with the engineers. We argue that given the entanglement of evaluative and descriptive aspects of risk, it is important to develop approaches geared at this third turn, which is only now starting to take place. We propose that phronesis can play an important role in making context-sensitive assessments of evaluative aspects of risks, and that it can be assisted by emotions and art, as sources of moral reflection.