Warming Homes, Cooling the Planet: An Analysis of Socio-Techno-Economic Energy Efficiency Policy and Practice in the UK

Energy efficiency governance in the UK is a crucial component of tackling climate change as around 27% of UK carbon dioxide emissions come from homes (DEFRA, 2006). However, the UK has approximately 30,000 excess winter deaths every year (Help The Aged, 2007) and over 5 million UK households were in fuel poverty in 2008 (NEA, 2008) as a result of interactions between high energy costs, poor energy efficiency practices, problematic materialities and low incomes. These hugely important issues are made difficult to resolve as a result of the powerful and far reaching social, technical and economic relationships, flows and fixities that constitute energy networks. The thesis focuses on the challenges faced by householders in their everyday use of energy and how, in different ways, they engage with and disengage from governing agencies, and the issues of fuel poverty and climate change. It analyses how attempts to address the issues are coordinated locally, in three areas of the North of England, and in national policy arenas. In particular, attention is paid to the sometimes synergistic yet sometimes problematic outcomes that result when attempts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from homes become entangled with efforts to make energy more affordable for those vulnerable to fuel poverty

Complexity, entanglement, and overflow in the new carbon economy: the case of the UK’s Energy Efficiency Commitment

I use ideas about the complexity of economic and sociotechnical relations, drawing especially on the work of John Law and Michel Callon, to consider domestic energy efficiency in a landscape in which governmental interventions attempt to reduce carbon emissions while also tackling fuel poverty. Policy responses to energy efficiency in the UK largely framed by ‘the market’ go on to perform the market in interventions such as the Energy Efficiency Commitment. The way that the Energy Efficiency Commitment has been designed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions while performing a welfare function and the multiple effects of calibrating it in such a way are explored in the paper. In particular, I suggest that attempts to order and govern energy networks struggle to contain the generative effects that stem from climate change and fuel poverty being hardwired to the same technical and social phenomena such as homes, energy technologies, and energy users.