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

In Search of Complementarity: Insights from an Exercise in Quantifying Qualitative Energy Futures

In this study, we considered a bridging strategy between qualitative and quantitative research with the aim of achieving complementarity. A pilot case study using the Sheffield Elicitation Framework “SHELF” to estimate appropriate inputs for a quantitative energy systems model (based on a qualitative energy future scenario) was used to gain insights. Of novelty are the ethnographic insights of an example translation procedure as well as the methodological approach of the translation procedure itself. This paper reports the findings from this exercise concerning the practicalities of applying such a technique and the observations from the expert elicitation process itself. Based on this pilot, we make two recommendations. The first is the importance of devising a strategy in projects, and research programmes, where bridging between qualitative and quantitative research activities would be most effective. The second is that observations of discussions during the expert elicitation process provide value in the provenance of the estimates for quantitative modelling purposes and provide considerations for further development of qualitative future scenario

The co-construction of energy provision and everyday practice: integrating heat pumps in social housing in England

Challenges of energy security, low carbon transitions, and electricity network constraints have led to a shift to new, efficient technologies for household energy services. Studies of such technological innovations usually focus on consumer information and changes in behaviour to realise their full potential. We suggest that regarding such technologies in existing energy provision systems opens up questions concerning how and why such interventions are delivered. We argue that we must understand the ways by which energy systems are co-constituted through the habits and expectations of households, their technologies and appliances, alongside arrangements associated with large-scale socio-technical infrastructures. Drawing on research with air-source-to-water heat pumps (ASWHP), installed as part of a large trans-disciplinary, utility-led research and demonstration project in the north of England, we investigate how energy services provision and everyday practice shapes new technologies uptake, and how such technologies mediate and reconfigure relations between users, providers and infrastructure networks. While the installation of ASWHP has led to role differentiation through which energy services are provided, the space for new forms of co-provision to emerge is limited by existing commitments to delivering energy services. Simultaneously, new forms of interdependency emerge between users, providers and intermediaries through sites of installation, instruction, repair and feedback. We find that although new technologies do lead to the rearrangement of practices, this is often disrupted by obduracy in the conventions and habits around domestic heating and hot water practices that have been established in relation to existing systems of provision. Rather being simply a matter of increasing levels of knowledge in order to ensure that such technologies are adopted effi ciently and effectively, our paper demonstrates how systemic arrangements of energy provision and everyday practice are co-implicated in socio-technical innovation by changing the nature of energy supply and use

Fostering active network management through SMEs’practises

Managing the electricity network through ‘smart grid’ systems is a key strategy to address challenges of energy security, low carbon transitions and the replacement of ageing infrastructure networks in the UK. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have a significant role in shaping patterns of energy consumption. Understanding how their activities interrelate with changes in electricity systems is critical for active network management. A significant challenge for the transformation of electricity systems involves comprehending the complexity that stems from the variety of commercial activities and diversity of social and organizational practises among SMEs that interact with material infrastructures. We engage with SMEs to consider how smart grid interventions ‘fit’ into everyday operational activities. Drawing on analysis of empirical data on electricity use, smart metre data, surveys, interviews and ‘energy tours’ with SMEs to understand lighting, space heating and cooling, refrigeration and IT use, this paper argues for experimenting with the use of practise theory as a framework for bringing together technical and social aspects of energy use in SMEs. This approach reveals that material circumstances and temporal factors shape current energy demand among SMEs, with ‘connectedness’ an emergent factor

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.

Peak electricity demand and the flexibility of everyday life

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions from energy consumption in the UK is increasingly linked to the introduction of uncontrollable sources of power, such as solar PV and wind, and the electrification of energy services (Darby, 2012; Department of Energy and Climate Change, 2013, 2011). Electrifying heating and personal mobility requires moving them off the gas grid and petrol pump and onto the electricity system, which in turn may have implications for the profound peak in electricity use that takes place in the early evening. While the conventional response would be to reinforce electricity networks, under conditions where there are an increasing range and diversity of sources of electricity generation that are less predictable and controllable, there is increased political and commercial interest in managing demand in these periods. Demand Side Management (DSM) enabled by smart grids promises to bring consumers of electricity into the management of the grid by asking them to provide the flexibility and responsiveness that the industry may lose in the future. In this paper we draw on 186 qualitative home tours in the UK to examine how such forms of flexibility are constituted. Rather than seeing flexibility as related to the characteristics of individuals and their behaviour, as is common in the industry and policy, we argue that it is the social practices which shape electricity demand curves that need to be at the centre of analysis. To illustrate this argument, we consider how, in what ways and for what purposes consumption of electricity may be or become flexible in response to a time of use tariff designed to reduce consumption in the early evening. We argue that the rhythmic qualities of practices and the degree to which there are socially conventional times and ways to perform particular practices can constrain or open up their ability to adapt to interventions

The Co-Construction of Energy Provision and Everyday Practice: Integrating Heat Pumps in Social Housing in England

Challenges of energy security, low carbon transitions, and electricity network constraints have led to a shift to new, efficient technologies for household energy services. Studies of such technological innovations usually focus on consumer information and changes in behaviour to realise their full potential. We suggest that regarding such technologies in existing energy provision systems opens up questions concerning how and why such interventions are delivered. We argue that we must understand the ways by which energy systems are co-constituted through the habits and expectations of households, their technologies and appliances, alongside arrangements associated with large-scale socio-technical infrastructures. Drawing on research with air-source-to-water heat pumps (ASWHP), installed as part of a large trans-disciplinary, utility-led research and demonstration project in the north of England, we investigate how energy services provision and everyday practice shapes new technologies uptake, and how such technologies mediate and reconfigure relations between users, providers and infrastructure networks. While the installation of ASWHP has led to role differentiation through which energy services are provided, the space for new forms of co-provision to emerge is limited by existing commitments to delivering energy services. Simultaneously, new forms of interdependency emerge between users, providers and intermediaries through sites of installation, instruction, repair and feedback. We find that although new technologies do lead to the rearrangement of practices, this is often disrupted by obduracy in the conventions and habits around domestic heating and hot water practices that have been established in relation to existing systems of provision. Rather being simply a matter of increasing levels of knowledge in order to ensure that such technologies are adopted effi ciently and effectively, our paper demonstrates how systemic arrangements of energy provision and everyday practice are co-implicated in socio-technical innovation by changing the nature of energy supply and use

Governing inclusive finance workshop: towards a manifesto for change

The Governing Inclusive Finance Workshop was designed to foster new conversations between academics and multiple stakeholder groups in response to problems of financial exclusion, and possibilities for fostering progressive change. On Wednesday 27 June 2018, a diverse group of credit unions, community banks, alternative lenders, local-, county- and regional- government officials, advisory organizations and academic researchers – each involved or interested in financial provision for historically excluded people, families and communities – joined one another in conversation around three core themes: Making visible the lived realities of financial exclusion in the UK; Alleviating financial hardship: organizational successes and ongoing governance challenges; and Developing a manifesto for financial justice. By coming together as a group around these themes – discussing them freely and sharing experiences, challenges and ideas – our overarching aim was to begin an ongoing conversation around financial inclusion in the UK with a view to imagining more socially just forms of financial inclusion: i.e. forms of finance that have 'inclusiveness' at their heart. The day was arranged around three sessions in which a panel of experts each spoke for ten minutes about their experiences and ideas. The goal was to keep the format as relaxed as possible (no power point presentations!) – just the participants sharing themselves, their organizations and the people they deal with day-to-day. An academic Chair kept the sessions moving and on time, firing animating questions at the panel members, then guiding all participants through the various breakout discussions and plenary conversations. All in all, the day was filled with lively conversation and mutual engagement as a sense of purpose and potential filled the air