Activities | Good-by-Devicing

3rd Scientific Advisory Board Meeting 2026

This year’s Scientific Advisory Board meeting took place at Baltic Energy Island’s offices in Rønne, Bornholm, on September 30th – October 2nd, during wonderful Indian Summer weather.

The program was packed with presentations from the Good-by-Devicing project team, including an overview of past events related to energy islands, but first and foremost diving deeper into the notion of “good-by-devicing” and how it may come to constitute a new analytical strategy for inquiry into the design of energy transitions, and with what implications for what concerns and valuations are included and excluded. We toyed with the emic notion of energy islands as ‘systems of systems’ (and devices within devices) - experimenting with the metaphor of ‘holon’ (and holarchy) - which led to much engaged discussions. It also informed the presentation and discussion of our preliminary thoughts on the concept of ‘re-devicing’, which lies as the foundation for our fourth and final workshop: a data-sprint that will take place in spring 2027, looking closer into the construction of ‘the business case’ and its ‘cost-benefit analysis’. We also heard paper presentations from the project team on the role of wake modeling devices and the design of the forthcoming transformer station on Bornholm, as well as presentations by board members, hereunder Kristin Asdal on the role of licensing and concessions as little tools of ‘appropriation’, and Brice Laurent on ‘Standard politics for non-standard times?’.

Apart from intense discussions of the various academic paper drafts, the program also included playing a board game that revolves around the energy island concept, developed by Daniel Nordstrand Frantzen (in collaboration with team members), a presentation from CEO of Baltic Energy Island, Søren Møller Christensen, a tour around Elværket - the future home of the Baltic Energy Island organization and a core part of what is envisioned to become a hub for innovation, training and education activities. We also took a tour of the island visiting the prospective site of the energy island’s transformer station, as well as the picturesque beaches of Dueodde and the harbour town of Svaneke. Holding the advisory board meeting on Bornholm, the island that we have spoken about so warmly for the past couple of years to our board members, turned out to be a wonderful opportunity for them to get a better feeling for what an energy island might come to mean for the local community and for the landscape and nature, and the socio-material work involved in mobilizing support for such an immense transformation of our energy system.

3rd Workshop

As part of Folkemødet in June 2026 (The Danish National Democracy Festival), we invited a mix of technical experts and local actors to participate in the third co-production workshop of our research project ‘Good-by-Devicing’. The workshop took place in Bornholmerhuset in the heart of Allinge, surrounded by artefacts of local history, as well as by the buzz and vibe of a lively Bornholm full of energy. The aim of our workshop was to rethink the idea of a 'business case'.

To kickstart the discussion, we had asked everyone to bring with them an item that represented something they cared about – a ‘care object’ – and which they hoped could be included in ‘the business case’. People had certainly used their creativity, bringing care objects ranging from e.g. a local piece of stone, a model of a wind turbine, and even an empty chair (representing a lack of engagement). With the icebreaker successfully completed, we presented participants with our view on the construction of a business case, inviting them to think of it not as a singular thing aimed at creating the most profit but, instead, we broadened the idea to encompass a constellation of business cases aimed at creating a maximum of value – both quantitative and qualitative - for different types of stakeholders, whoever they may be.

Divided into three groups – the state’s business case, the local municipality’s business case, and a developer’s business case – participants reflected on a number of aspects, for instance, "Who is doing the valuing?" "What is being valued?" and most abstractly, "How is value valued?", and “could it be valued otherwise?”.

We used the case of Energy Island Bornholm to provide context for their reflections on the values they saw as crucial for ‘the business case’, and to anchor discussions on the limits to commensurability and quantification. This led to a final discussion where participants considered which of these values it might be possible to include in a conventional business case, and which are potentially impossible to include.

We thank all participants for their enthusiasm and valuable inputs! The workshop generated plenty of ideas and material for us to prepare for the fourth and final co-production workshop in the Good-by-Devicing project; a workshop where we will experiment – for the first time – with ‘re-devicing’ of the energy transition, using the case of ‘the business case’ of energy islands. This final workshop will take place in early 2027, so stay tuned!

2nd Workshop

Following our first Good-by-Devicing workshop held at the Energy Island Summit on Bornholm in December 2025, we engaged with local stakeholders in our second workshop in April 2026. The aim was to explore how energy islands may be designed to better include diverse, qualitative values – also deep in the key expert devices partaking in the orchestration of the energy transition. Participants from diverse organisations helped us to map key devices (instruments, tools) shaping Energy Island Bornholm, examining how these might incorporate broader concerns. Together, the two workshops feed into both a mapping of critical expert tools and devices developed and deployed in the early design phase of energy islands and hubs, and into our mapping of valuation struggles in the energy transition. For more details on the workshop - hosted by our good colleagues at the Centre for Regional and Tourism Research in Hasle, Bornholm - please see here

The Energy Island Game

We have developed a board game simulating the complexities and uncertainties related to planning energy islands. It is a collaborative game, where the players act as planners who must negotiate agreements with other countries, establish connections with HVDC cables and build the needed wind energy capacity. The game was tested with high school students and engineers as part of the Danish Science festival ('Forskningens Døgn') 2026. We are currently reworking the game with the aim of using it as part of focus group research.

Locating the energy islands in the election

Daniel Nordstrand Frantzen from Good by Devicing participated in ECHOlab’s mapping of the 2026 parliamentary election in Denmark. As part of the project it was traced how candidates debated the energy islands on social media. It was evident that the Bornholm Energy Island especially was brought up in debates about nuclear energy that got a lot of attention during the election. The people behind the project have written a short piece about this at Klimamonitor (in Danish). If you want to learn how the mapping was done, check this video. The map can be found here.

1st Workshop

At the Baltic Energy Island Summit, the members of Good-by-devicing held the first of four workshops. Here the participants being mainly technically-oriented experts were asked the to engage with energy islands, listing all the instruments and tools that go into the orchestration of this big ‘system of systems’ that makes up an energy island. The workshop had a succesful turnout and we wish to thank everyone for participating. To learn more about the workshop, you may read this short article with our initial reflections.

Photo credits: Jesper Westley

Communication Training

Members of Good-by-devicing - Daniel, Emil, Tom, and Julia - were joined by Rebekka Nordal Thomsen and Julius Kob from Julia's Sapere Aude project Expertise of Expectations for a communication workshop conducted by SPHERE communications November 2025. The articulated aim was to develop a shared narrative and lay the groundwork for a strategic communication plan in the respective projects as well as across. These efforts are part and parcel in consolidating a strong focus on STS studies of energy at the Science and Technology section at DTU Management.

Scientific Advisory Board 2025

The second meeting of the Scientific Advisory Board took place at the Technical University of Denmark on September 15–16, 2025, in a hybrid format. The program included two presentations from board members and structured discussions on the progress of the individual work packages as well as the overall project. Participants also visited Powerlab DK, where professor Jacob Østergaard gave a presentation focusing on various Bornholm-related data measurement campaigns.

Energy Issue Map

The Danish Energy Islands Issue Atlas was co-funded by the Good-By-Devicing project & ECHO Lab at DTU Management and was assembled in collaboration with students from the Polytechnic foundation courses in Science, Technology, and Society at DTU. The Atlas was designed by Ainoa Pubill and Sarah Feldes, together with Mathieu Jacomy, Anders Kristian Munk, Julia Kirch Kirkegaard, Tom Cronin, Emil Nissen, Sebastian Husted and Daniel Nordstrand Frantzen.

All associated resources are available through this Github page.

Professor Julia Kirch Kirkegaard: Good energy – Struggles valuing energy transitions in Denmark Climate change and its consequences have led to calls for accelerating and upscaling renewable energy developments. Yet, these advances and changes to existing energy infrastructures often produce controversy and bring with them unforeseen consequences of their own. These controversies are tied to questions of what is ‘good’ and what counts as ‘good energy’. Key to understanding this are the tools, devices, and expertise that have been used in the design of our energy future. After introducing the state-of-the-art on valuation struggles over the energy transition, the lecture sets out a new research direction, pointing towards a ‘sociology of devicing’, to critically probe the (often invisible) role of devices in valuing what kind of energy future should come to count. Empirical examples used are wind energy, energy islands, and Power-to-X Julia Kirch Kirkegaard is professor of Social Studies of Energy, and focusses particularly on energy transition controversies.

Inaugural Lecture

At the joint professorial inaugural lecture on 6th March 2025 Julia Kirch Kirkegaard and Anders Kristian Munk talked about the valuation struggles and controversies that new technologies sometimes create, how we can learn more about them, and from there create a better connection between technology and society.

Watch the lecture here or read more about the two lectures of the day below.

Professor Anders Kristian Munk: Mapping technological problems in society Technologies have always had the potential to change our lives. It is therefore natural that technology is something we discuss in society. Different people with different interests and values look differently on consequences, potentials, risks, and ethics. It has never been more important to understand these differences. We live in a time where the pace of technological development and the complexity of the societal challenges it is meant to address make it difficult to grasp which actors are raising which questions and with what consequences. We need continuous and updated knowledge about technologies as wicked problems in society to understand, navigate, and prioritize the way we engage with techno-scientific controversies. In his inaugural lecture, Anders Kristian Munk talks about the mapping of these controversies and the opportunities currently created by data science and machine learning for a field of research that has traditionally been qualitatively oriented. Anders Kristian Munk is a professor in computational anthropology and focuses especially on large language models and their challenges and potentials as research instruments.

Scientific Advisory Board 2024

The first Scientific Advisory Board was held in Rungstedgaard in a hybrid manner on November 20th - 22nd 2024 . Here, the visiting board members gave presentations from their fields of expertise respectively and gave feedback to presentations from Julia Kirch Kirkegaard, Tom Cronin, Kristoffer Marslev, and Emil Nissen. The meeting also featured a visit to the contemporary exhibition "Ocean" at Louisiana, Humlebæk that sparked lively discussions amongst the participants.