Week 3 Lecture I Flashcards
‘grand narrative’ vs reality
Energy transitions involve long-term structural change and are generally presented and discussed in ‘grand narrative’ terms: low carbon, sustainable growth, smart systems.
Yet demand for energy services has always been highly distributed and local considerations are also becoming more prominent on the supply side, with developments in distributed electricity generation and heat networks.
Many older residents had experienced a transition
from belonging to fuel-producing communities and handling solid fuels to becoming ‘consumers’ in uneasy and uncomprehending relationships with distant suppliers of gas and electricity.
Their stories add texture to ‘grand narratives’ of energy transition, demonstrating, for a particular place and time, some of the complexity and path dependencies of energy systems and how they play out in social and distributional terms.
actors involved in the transition
They show how local resources, institutions, social networks and built environment can affect energy services and responses to them, highlighting the role of ‘middle actors’ in an energy advice service as guides to transition.
The title of this paper promised a tale concerning coal (geography, culture, local economy, resilience, community); steel houses (building materials and techniques); and the man in the moon (remoteness/ immediacy, communication, technologies).
main lesson to emerge from these West Lothian stories
even when energy supply is largely in the hands of large corporate businesses and regulated nationally, demand remains stubbornly localised, influenced by the state of housing, employment, income and the transfer of knowledge and skill between individuals and organisations.
Gas and electricity may be the same in any place
but they are not bought, used and understood in the same way in any place: housing, climate, demographics and social networks, all place-specific, are important in influencing how energy is captured and used.
This paper starts from two premises:
that energy transition operates at many levels or scales and can be understood at many levels; and that transition is not a uniform process but one influenced by both geography and history
personal stories
It offers extracts from residents and energy advisers’ accounts of energy transition in a particular locality and uses them to illustrate the value of personal and communal stories for energy research and policy.
In particular, the stories illustrate ways in which geography, history and politics have shaped the built environment and patterns of energy supply and demand, the impacts of change on relatively vulnerable citizens, and the role of energy advisers in helping them to cope
The paper demonstrates how
individual and localised stories can contribute to analysis of topics such as utility-customer relations and social adaptation to changing circumstances; and it supports the argument for attending to the role of ‘middle actors’ in energy transition [3], not least because of the interpretive skills of these actors and their ability to communicate between actors and channel resources.
To reduce fuel poverty:
improve access to information and advice and in particular raise
awareness of energy related matters
• increase household disposable income through either maximising income, ensuring
• maximum benefits take-up, or minimising expenditure by reducing fuel bills
• improve comfort levels in homes and therefore the health of the residents
• encourage landlords to adopt an effective policy on energy efficiency and fuel poverty
• promote the re-utilisation and conservation of resources’.
significance of the local authority employees as middle-actors
contributing knowledge and skills that would traditionally have been either unnecessary or provided by family and friends.
Four aspects of a home are distinguished:
a place for security and control,
for activity,
for relationships and continuity, and
for identity and values.
This can be valuable when evaluating how smart home technologies work in real homes, as well as in the more technical and prospective approaches to developing new socio-technical configurations
why people don’t want smart homes
Explanations for the reluctant homeowners are diverse but include questions of reliability, cost, control, privacy and security
crucial to smart home solutions is the
The active participation of citizens is considered crucial to this strategy and it is made clear that citizen participation and engagement form part of smart solutions in the home, although the documents tend to be vague about the form that this engagement should take
First is home as security and control.
In opposition to workplace, institutions and cities or wild nature, home is the place where you are in control and can feel safe, even though, or maybe precisely because, the home might be surrounded by a hostile society. The home in this understanding is thus also associated with a safe haven and a refuge from the surroundings. Després talks about security and control as one aspect of home and a refuge from the outside world as another aspect, whereas in our terminology we combine them into one as we see them as two sides of the same experience.
From a sociological perspective [3] it can, however, be objected that home is not always a secure place, for instance for abused women and children, and that, for example, many teenagers might not feel that home is where they are in control of their own lives. The importance of home as control and safety can maybe best be understood, paradoxically, when studying those who have to live in places which do not accommodate this notion of the home, such as marginalised people living in rooming houses
Second is the home as a site of activity,
either in the form of the many different activities of cooking, cleaning, eating and sleeping which constitute everyday life, or
in the form of actually working on and with the home, physically transforming the home to make it the place that best accommodates our activities and ideas. In the categories from Després [7], she mentions three different meanings of the home including the home as something to act upon and modify, the home as a centre of activity and the home as a material physical structure, whereas we in our approach combine these three into one aspect of the home as a physical place for activities.
Third, the home is a place for relationships and continuity.
home is a temporal process, changing over time but also relating back to what was before.
family in the way houses have been handed from one generation to another [6], but also to our childhood memories of our birth home and generally to a sense of belonging and having roots
relationship with families and friends, with a strong connotation of home as a place to strengthen relationships with people one cares for
The fourth, home as identity and values.
home as a reflection of one’s ideas and values, home as an indicator of social status, and home being a property to own
Bourdieu, expressing how we reflect our lifestyle to ourselves and show it to others through our possessions, unconsciously guided by our habitus
Higher social classes distinguish themselves from lower through their cultural and economic capital and new ideas of highbrow consumption continuously engender new questions of what an ‘ideal home’ should look like.
The decoration of our homes not only signals to others who we are but also works as a reflection of and dialogue with ourselves of what is important and right to us. What people do to their homes, in the form of retrofitting, decorating and furnishing them, might thus reflect different understandings of consumer cultures [29].
Housing researchers argue that the home is increasingly becoming an expression of the residents and their values and lifestyles [31] and that the house with its interior decorations and other equipment can be seen as a microcosm reflecting the residents’ social values and identities
different social groups relate differently
to meanings of home, and how these different meanings of home relate to socio-economic differences and societal power relations.
maybe your neighbourhood or nation
Concepts of a smart home:
Digital sensing
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and with connected appliances that can be
Remotely monitored and controlled
Responding to householder needs
Learning about the household
smart homes and other buildings are seen as flexibly-connected and interacting elements of energy systems
At the individual household level, ‘smarting’ may integrate
electrical devices and services (for example, heating, lighting, security, photovoltaic generation, electric vehicle charging) for remote control by the occupants or some other agent [37]; moving beyond this, sensors and processors can also ‘acquire and apply knowledge’ about a home, acting independently of direct human agency to change control settings
One rationale for smart homes is that they can promote
system efficiency by helping to reduce peak demand and to match demand with supply in real time.
A smart building is highly energy efficient and covers its very low energy demand to a large extent by on-site or district-system-driven renewable energy sources.
A smart building
(i) stabilises and drives a faster decarbonisation of the energy system through energy storage and demand-side flexibility;
(ii) empowers its users and occupants with control over the energy flows;
(iii) recognises and reacts to users’ and occupants’ needs in terms of comfort, health, indoor air quality, safety as well as operational requirements
But a home is, by definition, occupied by humans and the way in which it is occupied has a major and well-documented effect on energy outcomes
We can therefore expect the distribution of smartness/intelligence and agency between technology and humans to be an important influence on consumption, responsiveness to system conditions and occupant satisfaction.
If a smart home system is seen as primarily for convenience and comfort, then this undermines assumptions of resource efficiency and demand reduction within a home
But for the purposes of this paper, a high level of device connectedness within and beyond the home, along with reliance on that connectivity for everyday operations, are seen as crucial when defining whether a home may be called ‘smart’.
the term ‘smart’ is associated with emotive and affective meanings such as cleverness and neatness and also with negative connotations such as loss of privacy, loss of control and risks to health
Smart homes, security and control
There are also interests in developing in-home health monitoring and technology for assisted living for people with chronic illness or disability.
But to adopt smart technology is to open up data flows within the home and between it and the outside world, and privacy concerns have been a factor limiting enthusiasm for smart home technology
likely to influence where they wish to draw the boundaries of ‘home’ as a secure place.
For example, while load-shifting may help to keep a neighbourhood electricity network stable, there may be safety concerns about operating appliances while the householder is absent
