Norway exemplifies a number of paradoxes in relation to the just transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy provision. We investigate these paradoxes by focusing on key controversies from the oil and gas sector and onshore wind power. Despite the widespread interest in avoiding conflict and increasing public acceptance, this article sees controversies as useful sites for uncovering justice issues in possible transition pathways. The controversies reveal competing interpretations of just transition amidst an inadequate cross-cutting policy response. Conventional solutions for restructuring petro-maritime industries involve taking controversies out of sight from the public and internalizing the issue of just transition to the sector’s needs. This achieves only shallow engagement with broader society regarding the scope of societal transition needed to meet climate policies. Controversies around onshore wind installations are on the doorsteps of communities themselves and call attention to the difficult social aspects of transition that require a much broader public debate and policy response. We conclude that just transition should not be interpreted sectorally in competing energy futures but rather should infiltrate both the fossil and renewables sides of the Norwegian energy provision paradox.

The smart grid has become important in energy discussions. Inspired by science and technology studies (STS), this article compares four smart grid demonstration projects that engage households in Norway, where much activity has been triggered by a mandatory roll-out of smart electricity meters by 2019. We ask how local actors across different sectors interpret the potential of smart electricity meters, and how different understandings lead to diverging innovation strategies. The result is four case studies illustrating how smart grid set-ups are constructed, and how new smart technologies are socialized into pre-existing localities or not. The four case studies highlight: (1) a constellation of healthcare and the electricity industry, resulting in a focus on simplicity and welfare. (2) A merger between the construction industry and the electricity industry, exploring how passive houses, PV-systems and smart technology influence collective practices. (3) How local authorities, research and industry interpreted smart grids differently, resulting in a focus on “greening”, grid optimization and user flexibility. (4) How organizational and disciplinary conflicts led to alienation from the smart grid concept, hindering socialization. This diversity within a small country suggests that smart grids should be treated as situated technology rather than a “catch-all” silver bullet.

This article analyses 1,073 e‐mails that were hacked from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November 2009. The incident was popularly dubbed ‘Climategate’, indicating that the e‐mails reveal a scientific scandal. Here we analyse them differently. Rather than objecting to the exchanges based on some idea about proper scientific conduct, we see them as a rare glimpse into a situation where scientists collectively prepare for participation in heated controversy, with much focus on methodology. This allows us to study how scientists communicate informally about framing propositions of facts in the best possible way. Through the eyes of science and technology studies, the e‐mails provide an opportunity to study communication as part of science in the making across disciplines and laboratories. Analysed as ‘written conversation’ the e‐mails provide information about processes of consensus formation through ‘agonistic evaluations’ of other scientists’ work and persuasion of others to support one’s own work. Also, the e‐mails contain judgements about other groups and individual scientists. Consensus‐forming appeared as a precarious activity. Controversies could be quite resilient in the course of this decade‐long exchange, probably reflecting the complexity of the methodological challenges involved.

The article provides a widened understanding of the concept of end-user flexibility and nuances the traditional individual-oriented approach often used in discussions on low carbon transitions. The authors draw on 75 narratives from of a group of end users that is often considered to be in a very flexible stage of life, namely students. They discuss the co-production of systems connected to material, structural and social factors that extend beyond individual willingness to be a flexible energy consumer. The article stresses that flexibility is shaped by living conditions, everyday life and social norms in particular ways that makes it hard to achieve for students and others living in shared households. The authors conclude that political incentives for low-carbon transitions typically exclude social groups such as students and other vulnerable groups in society, and hence may unintentionally create and reinforce what they term ‘flexibility poverty’.

There is a multitude of experimentation, pilot and demonstration projects across Europe aiming to reconfigure energy consumption and production systems. Demo-projects and experiments have been recognized as important instruments to implement sustainability transitions in practice. Transition scholars have done much to clarify how we should understand experiments and pilot projects, focusing on involved actors, what is learned, and how the knowledge is used. In this paper we study two pilot project and discuss their qualities as sites that bundle new systemic properties, technologies, regulations, business models and user practices in new ways. We discuss these cases as new configurations with promising transformative implications. The two cases studied are a Norwegian and an Austrian smart grid demonstration. Both cases represent companies that have transformed their relation to and participation in the transport system as an outcome of pilot projects and experiments. The study analyses the complexity of factors influencing the effectiveness and success of these reconfigurations in providing destabilization and change within until now relatively stable regimes.