摘要：While completing my PhD at Stanford University during the 1980s, I was able to support my doctoral studies with a part-time job at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). I worked at EPRI both before and after my anthropological fieldwork in an Indian village. As a consortium funded largely by electric utilities, EPRI’s charge was to take the industry’s pooled resources, fund research on specific issues important to electrical utilities, and then feed the research results back to the utilities in order to improve generation, transmission, distribution, and end use. Thirty years ago, EPRI was funding research that has only today become reality, like electric cars, or that is still not in common use, like smart meters, smart homes, the smart grid, and appliances that “talk back” to the grid and adjust their power usage.
