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Urban energy transitions are key components of urgently requisite climate changemitigation. Promissory discourse accords smart grids pride of placewithin them.We employ a living lab to study smart grids as a solution geared towardsupscaling and systematisation, investigate their limits as a climate changemitigation solution, and assess them rigorously as urban energy transitions.Our 18 month living lab simulates a household energymanagement platform inBergen.Norway’smitigation focus promotes smartmeter roll-out as reducing carbon emissions, by (i)unlocking efficiency gains, and (ii) increasing awareness for demand-sidemanagement.Weproblematise this discourse. Raising awareness encounters intractable challenges for smart grid scalability. Scattered efficiency gains constitutemodest increments rather than the substantial change requisite for rapidmitigation.Whereas promissory smart grid discourse overlooks these ground-truthed limits, ourfindings caution against misplaced expectations concerningmitigation.We contest discursive enthusiasmon smart grids and argue for aligning local and systemic concerns before upscaling to avoid obscuring risks. Scaling up requires understanding and addressing interdependencies and trade-offs across scales. Focus group discussions and surveyswith living lab participantswhoused sub-metermonitors to track real-time household electricity consumption data over an extendedperiod show that technical issues and energy behaviour, aswell as political economic andpolicy structures and factors, pose significant limits to smart grids.Urban strategies for climate changemitigationmust be informedby this recognition.Our results indicate that upscaling relies onbottom-uppopular acceptanceof the salient technical, organisational and standardisationmeasures, but thatmeasures to improve the democratic legitimacy of and participation in energy transitions remainweak.Wehighlight limits to smart grids as a standalone urban mitigation solution and call for a sharper focus onaccompanying thrust areas for systematisation and scalability, such as renewable energy integration and grid coordination.

Smart gridlock? Challenging hegemonic framings of mitigation solutions and scalability