Managing Conflicting Interests in Socio-technical Energy Systems - How to Identify and Mitigate Intra-actor Interests as Risk Factors

Global networks like energy grids, transportation networks or financial IT-infrastructure are crucial for the wealth of modern societies. Reliable and resilient control of these infrastructures thus has gained much attention in the last years. Typical approaches to ensure stable operation of these infrastructures follow two contradictory paradigms, i.e. complexity reducing and complexity increasing measures. Whereas the first are supposed to encapsulate interdependencies and decision-making processes and typically reduce transparency as a sideeffect, the latter strengthen the role of the human actor in these systems by increasing transparency to allow for well-informed decision-making. In this paper, we will discuss these two paradigms and show why intra-actor conflicts arise from adding both complexity and reducing transparency at the same time. We will outline a research agenda to model the effect of these conflicts using the example of energy systems and current transparency-enhancing technologies like e.g. distributed ledger technology.