Tsaglioti, Fotini | Greece

Fotini Tsaglioti is a doctoral candidate at the Graduate Program in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and the National Technical University of Athens. She holds master degrees from the same program (2007) and from the International Master Program in European Society, Science and Technology (2008). Her undergraduate degree was in physics (Department of Physics, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, 2004). Fotini‘s research is focused on historical, philosophical and STS (Science, Technology, Society) perspectives on technologies of automation. She is interested in the use of feedback (self-regulatory, self-control) arrangements in connection to their use in energy technologies. Her work pays special attention to the contrast between the rhetoric that accompanied the promotion of automation and problems regarding the sustainable use of technologies of automation in concrete contexts. The IAS-STS fellowship will allow her to extend her research so as to include the study of the use of automation technologies in the context of the regulation of wind power structures, historical and contemporary.

Regulating wind energy accumulation in autonomous units and industrial parks: Historical to policy considerations

Popular assumptions about wind energy habitually conflate autonomous (individually or community owned) wind energy units and industrial wind parks (farms), which are formed by the concentration of a considerable number of wind energy units in one area. This is also the case with other energies called renewable. This research seeks to question this assumption and think of its implications for policy-making in general and sustainable energy policy in particular. Differentiating properly between the two involves the very definition of an energy technology as renewable. Sustainable energy policy may not be compatible with all wind modes of energy generation.

From a technical viewpoint, this research project focuses on a key component of wind energy apparatuses used in order to regulate wind energy structures. The techniques of regulation (self-regulation, automation, control) of autonomous energy units have been rather different from those used in the case of wind farms. I focus specifically on a historically-grounded comparison between regulatory techniques of electricity generating wind energy structures. Differences in the mode of regulation of wind energy have resulted in important differences in the way energy has been accumulated and/or transmitted. This was coupled by important policy differences, governmental and business. In assessing comparatively these techniques I look at the decisive intervention of governmental policies favoring certain versions of electrification (ex. the huge water dams) instead of others (ex. small autonomous wind generators). The distinction between these different modes of energy production has been historically not only a matter of scale but fundamentally of the mode of energy production. The history of the use of considerably viable from a technical point of view wind-generators has a much deeper past than the literature that takes as its point of departure the early 1970s energy crisis suggests. It is not restricted to the attempts to construct gigantic wind-generators that were meant to supply an extended, large-scaled and long-distanced transmission network, but includes the individually owned wind-generators of the mid-war years in the USA, as well as cases of communal uses of wind-power in Europe. This history also challenges the popularly held assumption of wind-powered arrangements being predominantly pre-industrial, traditional, and pre-capitalistic. Wind energy has had a significant past as well in historical capitalism.

Selected publications

Aristotle Tympas, Fotini Tsaglioti, Theodore Lekkas, “Universal machines vs. national languages: Computerization as production of new localities”, Technologies of Globalization (proceedings), eds. Reiner Anderl, Bruno Arich-Gerz, Rudi Schmiede, Darmstadt: 2008.

Fotini Tsaglioti, ‘The Virtual Reality of Facebook’, Out of Line: 21, November 2008 (in Greek).

Fotini Tsaglioti, ‘The New Culture of Writing’, Avgi Newspaper, 13-05-2007, review of Bolter, Jay David, Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print, Metaichmio, (in Greek).