ABSTRACT. This paper attempts to investigate the decision-making process leading residential consumers to adopt energy efficient technologies on the basis of financial and other considerations. The analysis is based on an econometric model of the household’s decision to connect to a district-heating system, using data from a survey of households. The results suggest an internal discount rate of at least 40 per cent for homeowners, a signal that consumers undervalue future energy costs. In addition, we find household decisions are in accordance with heuristic measures of profitability; our prime example, leads us to believe that consumers are significantly and negatively affected by years of payback up to around 10 years. Our findings further suggest unobservable costs and inattention are central elements of the decision to connect. Thus, the consumers’ willingness to partake in a community-heating scheme in an effort to subsequently reduce future energy consumption is significantly limited by costly information search and the associated risk and hassle of installation.
   The empirical analysis further investigates how the investment constraints implied by objective measures of fuel poverty and subjective measures of financial vulnerability limit the uptake of energy efficient technology. In this section of our analysis, we utilise the Low-Income-High-Cost indicator and discover poverty to be the primary barrier hindering investment. However, we also find that higher energy demand increases the desire to participate in a district-heating scheme for consumers in poverty, but not for consumers above the poverty threshold. More specifically, energy poverty is found to increase the probability of participation by 10 percentage points in comparison with financially poor consumers, whose bills are lower than the median household; yet, no such relationship exists for consumers earning above the median. Finally, we present results of which suggest consumers that see themselves as financially constrained are 15 percentage points more likely to install efficient technologies, holding income and energy demand constant. Therefore, perceived energy vulnerability appears to elevate the consumers’ willingness to collectively reduce the future financial burden of energy demand.
    We believe these results help explain why consumers in the UK, particularly those on a low-income, are unlikely to invest in energy efficient technology; also, that the intrinsic link between high energy demand and financial vulnerability may be central drivers encouraging the collective participation in district heating schemes for consumers in poverty.

ABSTRACT. The performance of mundane everyday practices such as laundry, maintaining thermal comfort, electronic communication and food preparation, all utilize material elements in their performance. For example, at a minimum, laundry requires a washing machine and some mechanics for drying (i.e. a washing line, tumble dryer etc.). Consequently, the range of ‘materials’ an individual has access to will have a fundamental impact, not only on the nature of the performance, but also on the amount of energy consumed during it.  

One significant factor which contributes to the materials an individual can access is housing tenure. However, in the UK the vast majority of research into domestic energy use has focused on either owner occupied or social housing largely ignoring the rapidly growing private rental market.  This is predominately due to practical considerations related to access. There is currently very little known about energy use in the private rented sector.  However, the vast majority of people living in rented accommodation are unable to make any significant changes to the physical structure of their homes or heating systems, limiting their ability to improve its thermal efficiency. Furthermore, a growing proportion of rental properties come equipped with white goods, restricting the occupant’s ability to upgrade to more efficient devices.
This paper aims to highlight the impact that housing tenure and differing accesses to material goods have on the performance of everyday practices.  We present as a case study a comparison of the performance of maintaining thermal comfort, laundry and food preparation practices in two households. The occupants of the first household are a wealthy retied couple in their mid-60s who have designed and built their own 6-bedroom house, which they own outright. The occupants of the second property are also a couple in their mid-60s but reliant upon income support and live in a three bedroom privately rented house with their 6-year old granddaughter. While the analysis touches on the obvious ‘wealth’ differences between the two households, the primary focus is on the impact of the ability or lack of it to make structural changes to the property and select  ‘appropriate’ the large domestic appliances.

ABSTRACT. Several studies show that energy prices affect energy consumption. However, dominated by an economic approach, these studies often neglect to relate their findings to how energy is used in everyday life and therefore miss out on valuable insights on how economic conditions shape energy-consuming practices.
By applying a practice theoretical perspective on analysis of large data sets on district heating prices and consumption, I seek to bring new understandings of the empirical association between energy prices and residential energy consumption than the economic approach.
I do this in two ways; first, I focus on how the price elasticity differs for subgroups representing different everyday lives or different norms of comfort instead of solely focussing on economic aspects of the households. Second, I analyse the relation between district heating prices and consumption within the social and cultural context of it, which for example means that I interpret the results from a practice theoretical perspective on how energy is used through performing energy-consuming practices.
The analysis is based on unbalanced panel data from 2009 to 2013 with almost two million observations on standard prices for district heating supplier and district heating consumption used for space-heating and hot water for single-family detached houses. By applying a random effect panel model, I use the panel structure of the data to account for individual heterogeneity.

ABSTRACT. The future, viewed from the present, is not a realm of facts (Jouvenel, 1967), but of possibilities, potentials and expectations that shape the present (Borup, Brown, Konrad, & Van Lente, 2006). It has therefore been argued that social technology assessment requires critique of the socio-technical imaginaries through which visions of future technologies are constructed (Simakova & Coenen, 2013).  Technology assessment thus moves beyond weighing risks against benefits, and towards interrogating the ‘worlds’, including social relationships, practices and forms of life, that are implicated in future imaginaries (Macnaghten & Szerszynski, 2013). The contribution that qualitative social science research can make here by exploring the meanings of technologies within everyday practices has been demonstrated by, for example, Yolande Strengers’ ethnographic work on everyday energy use and imaginaries of ‘smartness’ (Strengers, 2013). In this paper, and contrasting with Strengers’ ethnographic approach, we show how the biographical investigation of everyday life can be used to develop deliberation on socio-technical imaginaries. Using a novel combination of narrative interviews and multimodal methods, the Energy Biographies project at Cardiff University has examined imaginaries of smartness through the lens of biographical experiences of transformations in how energy is used domestically. In particular, this approach can open up a critical space around future socio-technical imaginaries by exploring the investments that individuals have in different forms of engagement with the world, along with the relationship between these forms and particular technologies. Using a psychosocial framework that also draws on theoretical resources from science and technology studies, we show how these investments can lead to shifts in the meaning of taken-for granted assumptions about the meaning of concepts like convenience, and how valued forms of subjectivity may be conceptualised as emerging out of the ‘friction’ of engagement with the world. In this way, we demonstrate the value for of ‘thick’ data relating to the affective dimensions of subjective experience for social technology assessment.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, we contribute to discussions of the work that imagined futures do for policy, focusing on how future projections of renewable fuel supply have enabled the mobilisation and enactment of energy demand in UK transport policy over the past 15 years. Transport policy was traditionally built on a predict-and-provide model where expectations of (inevitably rising) demand helped make the case for provision to fulfil these demands (e.g., by road-building). Departing significantly from this approach (Goodwin 1999), the UK government’s ambitious New Deal for Transport (DETR 1998) invoked a future in which people routinely undertake fewer car journeys and where public transport is safer and more accessible. Reducing CO2 emissions was part of this vision, but in conjunction with projections of reduced demand from infrastructural changes. Throughout the 2000s national transport policy became more firmly rooted in the language of climate change, but with little by way of travel reduction strategies (Marsden and Rye 2010). We examine the paradoxical role of renewable fuel mandates in this transformation, focusing specifically on technical models of (future) energy demand and bioenergy (supply) potential, and government foresight documents from this period up to the more recent 2012 Bioenergy Strategy. Three turns are discernable. First, epistemic claims for future energy demands have reinforced political authority for biofuel supply policies, resulting in interventions to support the development of a biofuel production and research infrastructure. Second, these emerging infrastructures have in turn changed the baseline context for conceptualising future demand and how demand will be met. In the process, what counts as a viable transport infrastructure has been reimagined, remobilised and reconfigured, which we illustrate with the example of the interweaving of biofuel and (bio)hydrogen futures. As such, we show how notions of ‘demand’ and ‘supply’ form a powerful interface as part of past and on-going future-oriented world-making.

ABSTRACT. Significant factors in the success or failure of energy transition arise from the  spatial potential of places and their communities. Scenario planning appears to be an appropriate design instrument to enable architects to unveil, conceptualise, imagine, test and communicate this potential to stakeholders. This paper critically reflects on the scenario as an architectural design instrument. Inscribed with implicit political intentions, scenario planning may be a far from neutral design instrument. Instead of triggering communities to explore local energy potential, a scenario may have a normative effect on a community's imagination. The paper aims to define guidelines for the deployment of scenarios in an open, participatory planning process. To mediate in a local participatory planning process, we argue, scenarios should be situational, dynamic and open-ended, allowing or even triggering communities to (re)define the issues relevant to a place during the ongoing process of energy transition. How, when and where should scenario planning be deployed in order to enable communities to understand and develop their local energy potential?

ABSTRACT. What assumptions of (future) daily life – in particular those related to space for private cars – are embedded in local authority visions, strategies and plans and where do they come from? This question forms the focus of this paper which presents research in Stevenage New Town. Archive and historical work has focussed on the changing infrastructure of homes and daily life between 1950 and the present. This has given us insight into some historic mechanisms by which parking spaces, driveways and garages became a normal part of planning the home. 
The paper argues that car parking provides a means to study infrastructure as part of a living system of practice. On the one hand, car parking space is part of the infrastructure. It represents the planners’ best guess of where destinations will be, and forms the nodes of the road network. On the other hand, parked cars are part of a living system of practice. They signify the destinations, the places, of social practices that have in one way or another become dependent upon the car. The paper shows that the relationship of planners to this living system of practice changed across the period of study, from envisioning, to survey and provide to predict and provide. Through surveying, retrofitting, predicting and planning for future projections of car ownership, car parking and parking spaces were critical elements of how car use and automobility managed to be what they are.
From this work, the question arises of which assumptions exist today, how they are formed, and which futures of automobility they anticipate. This is explored through a review of the current publically available ‘Car Parking Strategy’. The paper concludes with some reflections on how we might draw on our research to anticipate a Stevenage that is free of private cars.

ABSTRACT. -

ABSTRACT. Most of the debates around collaborative consumption deal with the strong dynamics of peer-to-peer online platforms such as Airbnb, Zilok and blablacar. Mobile technology and web2.0 are regarded as being the main elements which have enabled the sharing of goods with strong “idling capacity”. This strong emphasis on ICT technologies has led to a remarkable ignorance of small-scale, mainly or exclusively offline-based every-day sharing between neighbours. With my paper, I want make a contribution to close this gap, highlighting dynamics of every-day sharing between neighbours. This includes the sharing of spaces (e.g. guest rooms, community rooms, craft rooms, and gardens), stuff (tools, devices, appliances) and shared mobility (car and bike sharing) as well as associated service offers. Based on a total of 31 interviews with housing companies and associations, real estate developers, cities and city networks, cohousing activist associations, architectural companies, NGOs, think tanks and research institutions in France and in Germany, my paper discusses three trends of neighbourhood sharing in both countries: 1) A growing institutionalisation of cohousing. The challenges self-organised cohousing communities usually face to implement their projects have been considerably lowered by creating network organisations and advisory structures (a), accompanying process advisors and specialised architect networks (b), as well as by collective learning and standardisation processes (c). 2) Service-based “top-down” offers for sharing without previous participation of residents. Pioneering real estate developers have started experimenting with sharing facilities in high-rise buildings, which can be used by large numbers of households. These include, for instance, rooftop barbecues, gyms, kitchen lounges, guest rooms, co-working spaces, laundry services and even cinema rooms. 3) Collaborations between neighbourhood groups on the one hand and actors from the housing markets, namely housing companies, real estate developers, investors and municipalities, on the other hand. I will elaborate on neighbourhood groups and social housing companies jointly applying for communal calls for tenders, on investors signing “Generalmietverträge” (joint rental contracts) with neighbourhood groups, which co-design sharing facilities in their buildings and freely decide on applying households, as well as collaborations of municipalities with citizen associations and foundations to co-create housing with sharing facilities. My paper ends with some tentative reflections on how these developments might be interpreted in the lenses of the Multi-Level-Perspective and its conceptualisation of change as an outcome of interactions between dominant socio-technical regime structures, emerging alternative niche practices and large scale “landscape” developments.

ABSTRACT. This presentation draws on findings from a research project on households, sharing and consumption at the University of Manchester. Recently, economists and environmental scientists have focused on households, showing that their reducing size in average number of inhabitants has implications for environmental sustainability due to losses in economies of scale. Findings suggest that resources are shared better in large households. The paper analyses and theorises ‘shared’ domestic consumption, contextualised in literature about households, sharing and sustainable consumption. Recent survey data relating to meals and domestic laundry, two sociologically significant and resource-intensive spheres of domestic activity, are examined for evidence of sharing, with particular attention to differences across one-person and multiple-person households. Multiple person households apportion the resources involved in supplying practices through three modes of sharing. These are underpinned by standard material arrangements of households, in which certain goods and services are presupposed as being available to residents regardless of number. Arrangements and modes of sharing also surfeit the domestic sphere, with market, state and household infrastructures playing contextually variable roles in provisioning goods and services among populations. Examining different spheres of activity and different sites of provision reveals trajectories in modes and arrangements of sharing, affecting the social organisation of daily life and the resource intensity of production and consumption.

ABSTRACT. The study of energy demand diversity and evolution relies on buildings and appliances qualities, their environment and the performance of specific practices. However, in spite of the widely agreed fact energy is consumed in and for the performance of practices, researches continuously struggle to show a significant relationship between different doings and the variations in energy consumption measured on a large scale (Huebner, 2015). Even if the direct link between the use of specific appliances and their energy consumption can be measured, it seems this link blurs into the complexity of the many practices performed over a year or across large samples of consumers, letting only steady infrastructures and shared contingency mark the shape of demand.
Still social practices can have large scale or regular structures based on repetition, synchronisation or sequencing, that should not just result into a random noise.
In this research we look for the energy footprint of practices which are widely shared, highly regular, and key markers in the social organisation: eating practices. Different types of meals and food preparation have been described based on the quantitative data collected in the French and UK Time Use Surveys, in terms of time, durations, secondary activities, participants and places. Surrounding activities allowed to specify the meanings and constraints attached to each type of meal. The distribution of these practices was studied across several time scales (week days, seasons, and decades from 1974 to 2010) and areas (UK, France and regions). The temporal and spatial variations of eating practices were then compared with the energy demand variations, as measured by the power grid or as part of specific campaigns, along the same axes. This comparison reveals how parts of the energy demand dynamic are related to specific practices and their synchronisation. Finally, the mechanism of this coevolution could be partly interpreted in the light of wider social changes.

ABSTRACT. Households wishing to better manage their expenditure need to develop an understanding of what they spend money on. In the same way does better energy management require a detailed understanding of energy uses. To date this knowledge is poorly developed - both at household and at national level.

The aggregate UK load profile is well known. It can be used to forecast demand with some precision to schedule different sources of generation. The actual uses to which this electricity is put remain, however, largely unknown. To improve efficiency policy and to develop new approaches to bring about load shifting for improved integration of renewable sources of energy, new approaches are needed to shine a light on household uses of electricity.

This paper presents early findings from an ambitious project on the relationship between household activities and their electricity consumption. The data in this paper has been obtained through a combination of time-use diary collection and smart phone based recordings of the household's electricity load at the same time. The approach allows for deep insights into socio-demographic distributions of electricity use patterns.

One of the novelties of the methodology presented here is the representation of activities at household level, involving all household participants above the age of 8. The interplay of activities and resulting household dynamics are suggested to have an important bearing of characteristic load profile properties and the scope for flexibility. The latter will receive greater attention in subsequent research as part of this project.

This paper focusses instead on the methodological challenges of collecting activity based data and the potential pitfalls in their interpretation. The methodology has been developed and refined in collaboration with leading academics in time-use research and demand modelling, and has been further scrutinised as part of an expert workshop. Points of contention will be discussed in this paper.

Despite the challenges of combining activity and electricity recordings, this paper will argue that the activity perspective afforded by time-use diary collections provides some systematic advantages over conventional 'appliance based' measurements or pure load profile analysis. Among them are greater cost effectiveness and scalability of the approach, as well as novel insights into the underlying patterns of household electricity consumption. This could constitute a major advance over conventional Markov chain models based on occupancy patterns and opens the door to evidence based analysis of load shifting approaches.

ABSTRACT. To date a great deal of work has been undertaken to describe, qualitatively and in detail, the nature of individual and bundles of domestic energy practices and their elements. But practices have a multitude of short-term and long-term trajectories as a consequence of the variations in their element configurations. This makes for a complex system that has not been investigated adequately. In this paper, an agent-based approach is used to model the processes capable of influencing the daily performances and the long-term evolution of domestic energy practices. Households, practices, and the elements of practices are considered as agents in the model. Households draw elements together to perform the practices. The repeated performance of practices influences changes in the underlying elements, which in turn influences the future performance of practices. In this manner, the processes leading to the performance, the repetition and the reproduction of practices are modelled. The energy use patterns of households, resulting as a consequence of the performance of practices, are also modelled.

ABSTRACT. This paper starts from the premise that energy demand emerges from the performance of interwoven social practices and that examining the changing temporal distribution of these performances may generate new insights into the way demand for energy has and will change in the United Kingdom (Shove and Walker 2014). The paper will outline the national time-use survey datasets from the 1960s to the present that have been made available by the Multinational Time Use Study (Gershuny et al. 2012) and will describe the harmonisation process that has been used by the MTUS team to attempt to support both cross-national and temporal comparative analysis. The paper will then uses this harmonised data to present analysis of the changing distribution of a range of ‘Activity Classes’. These harmonised ‘classes’ enable analysis of overall trends in the timing of (proxies for) ‘groupings’ of social practices over the last 30 years in the UK. By decomposing these classes into their constituent ‘time use activities’ the paper will then present analysis of trends in the timing of specific energy demanding practices (or their proxies), and indeed of practices that have come to demand energy. In so doing the paper will highlight the evolving configuration of energy demanding practices across a range of social dimensions in direct contrast to the apparent UK policy presumption of static (and immutable) demand. The paper will present largely descriptive analysis of the changing nature of laundry, of cooking and eating and of car use and will highlight how changing configurations of, especially, labour market constraints and participation are revealed. The paper will then outline an example of the way in which time-use diary data can be used to explore potential near future scenarios by adapting the analysis of car use to the need to anticipate additional power network loading as a result of electric vehicle charging at the population level. The paper will conclude by summarising the way in which time-use data can be used to highlight the significance of ‘non-energy energy’ policies and it’s potential value in tracking the evolution of energy demand practices.

ABSTRACT. My presentation will address the issue of changing and steering demand by situating this issue in the present age of complex systems. This will be done by shortly referring to a history of instrumentality whereby complex systems can be seen as the result of a series of fundamental transformations related to how human artefacts are conceived. These transformations can be characterised in terms of a progressive process of disembodiment and abstraction whereby, among other things, energy, time and information have been changed into quantifiable resource units regulating all activities performed by people and other biological entities. The proposed account will offer, on the one hand, the possibility to interpret complex systems and associated causation mechanisms as the result of a series of transformations in the central metaphors whereby change has been described and has manifested itself since the XIIth century. On the other hand, it will allow illustrating a) how energy and information have nowadays to be considered as the central metaphors around which the rituals generated by complex systems are arranged and b) how these metaphors tend to inhibit the exertion of practical knowledge due to the way in which they have been introduced and are being enacted to organize societies. In addition, this account will allow providing conceptual elements that can help understand how this situation generates a process of dis-embedding whereby the dynamics of complex systems tend to escape social control while reinforcing a perception of resources scarcity and dependency on industrial energy. Finally, it will allow offering what seems to me an interesting perspective to study social practices and to address the questions raised in the discussion paper on change.

ABSTRACT. In this piece I reflect on some of the questions raised in the discussion paper by Blue et al. entitled “The Dynamics of Demand: Methods and Concepts for Thinking about Demand”. Drawing on the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, I focus in particular on conceptualisations of change and stability and argue that common understandings of these terms are problematic abstractions that distract from the intertwining of change and stability. What Whitehead asks from us is to develop a mode of thinking and using the terms change and stability that respects their entwining and avoids the common favouring of one over the other. I offer some ideas in the direction that Whitehead’s philosophy indicates and draw a number of methodological implications from my understanding of change and stability for the analysis of energy demand, social practices and sociotechnical transitions.

ABSTRACT. Concepts of travel behaviour change pervade the empirical study as well as the policy rhetoric associated with national and local efforts to influence travel demand.  Despite multiple interventions, financial support and experimentation, the prevailing paradigm of automobility remains virtually intact.  Behaviour has not changed.  This paper takes a critical look at the conceptualisations of change embedded in behaviour change policies, and at the terms in which these policies are evaluated.  Change is typically understood as difference from a defined starting point and is assumed to occur as a consequence of a number of well-defined shifts which are in turn a direct outcome of deliberate intervention.  This misses an account of underlying change-processes, the mediating effect of interventions and related notions of transformational change.

ABSTRACT. Using new datasets from the UK Department of Transport that permit the calculation of annual fuel costs and Vehicle Excise Duty for all private motor vehicles under 3.5 tonnes in Great Britain, this paper presents an analysis on variations in household expenditure on motoring (particularly fuel costs) across England and Wales.  Building on earlier work that focussed on variations in financial impacts of motoring based on median income for areas, this analysis extends the research in two main ways.  Firstly through the use of UK Office for National Statistics’ “area classifications” which allow variation in expenditure (and expenditure as a proportion of income) to be analysed in terms of eight different social profiles.  Secondly, using UK Census Travel to Work data, we calculated an indicator that reflects the proportion of annual mileage driven by households in an area that is comprised of travel to and from work by car.  The results indicate that use of the car and the financial implications vary between different social areas, but there tends to be a negative relationship between the proportion of income spent on motoring and the proportion of mileage used for commuting (i.e. those areas that use their cars most for driving to work, actually spend less of their income on fuel costs).

ABSTRACT. Since the 70ies, many cities have experienced urban sprawl, which increases distances between different places of daily activities inside the city and tends to increase car dependence (Wiel 2002; Jouffe and Massot 2013: 25). This phenomenon has two major impacts: It entails repercussions on the environment by an increase in GHG emissions and sealing of landscapes. Furthermore, it puts a strain on households’ budgets, especially in a context where, despite the current stagnation of fuel prices, a long run raising energy prices could be expected. Research concerned with mobility, accessibility and land-use planning has taken up this topic of energy vulnerability (Polacchini and Orfeuil 1999; Gertz et al. 2009; Jouffe and Massot 2013). In parallel, a research field has developed, which focuses on the burden of energy expenses in the residential sector. The analysis led so far mainly adopt normative approaches of the issue. They aim to quantify the share of affected households and analyse policy measures to target them (Boardman 1991, 2010; Hills 2011, 2012).
While the quantification of the housing energy burden has been broadly explored, no consensus so far exists on how to measure the phenomenon of transport-related vulnerability, or “transport poverty”. The weakness of the European literature dealing with the connections between housing, transport, and energy expenses is any of the evidences (Mattioli, 2015). The absence of indicators to measure transport-related vulnerability also hinders the aggregation of both housing and transport energy burdens, which should help to identify households suffering from “double vulnerability”.
In order to develop a normative definition of transport-related vulnerability, our ongoing work proposes, first to identify clearly the methodologies followed in the various attempts to deal with transport-related expenses of households. This exhaustive literature review shall hence reveal the elements taken into consideration by the different authors.
The second phase of our work aims to propose a solid methodology for measuring transport-related vulnerability, which shall broadly take advantage of the literature analysis laid down before. The normative definition of transport-related vulnerability will be put to the test of the French city of Strasbourg. The elements suggested by ONPES (2015), will be taken as a baseline. This work will then complete the previous results, and reinforce the former methodology (Mayer et al., 2014) using normative definitions for both transport and housing energy burdens.
Even though our work deals with France, all along our work, we will be discussing the methods, indicators, and results observed in the literature, as well as the ones proposed by us. Consequently, even though our work focuses mainly on France, it might also constitute a base for discussion in other European countries.

ABSTRACT. In the UK at present domestic energy policies are framed in terms of reducing energy consumption and emissions while at the same time taking into account issues of affordability, which are part of the established fuel poverty agenda. Similar energy affordability issues in transport have not yet drawn the same attention. This is despite increasing recognition in international research that the costs of daily mobility, notably by car, can have important economic stress impacts, e.g. leading households to curtail expenditure in other essential areas. Different terms are used in the literature to indicate such problems, including ‘forced car ownership’, ‘transport poverty’, ‘oil vulnerability’, 'commuter fuel poverty', 'transportation affordability', 'précarité énergétique des transports' and 'car-related economic stress'.
This paper reports on the final findings of the (t)ERES project linked to the DEMAND Research Centre. It draws on four pieces of quantitative secondary data analysis to quantify the incidence of car-related economic stress in the UK and identify the characteristics of the population concerned. The first study applies a definition modelled on the current official definition of fuel poverty in England, i.e. as the overlap of low income and high transport costs (LIHC), to the most recent wave of the Living Costs and Food Survey (LCFS 2012). The second study employs the UK sample of the EU-SILC survey, focusing on households who own a car despite being in 'material deprivation', i.e. unable to afford several other essential items. The third study uses the Secure Access version of the LCFS and proposes a new metric of vulnerability to fuel price spikes, based on a dynamic and disaggregated understanding of car dependence, i.e. in terms of household price elasticities. The aim is to distinguish between households and social groups that cope with rising fuel prices by limiting their travel and those more likely to maintain mobility and curtail other areas of expenditure. The fourth study uses unique spatially disaggregated car test data (MOT) to provide a UK-wide map of fuel-related economic stress for car owning households and its relationships with fuel poverty, all the while taking into account vehicle fuel efficiency.
In exploring the same problem with different datasets and empirical definitions we aim to: (i) triangulate the findings; (ii) place the indicators and ‘location’ of this vulnerability into sharper focus; (iii) identify overlaps between communities which appear to be affected in more than one way; (iv) investigate the multifaceted nature of the phenomenon.

ABSTRACT. The Isle of Tiree, off the west coast of Scotland, is home to about 650 people, with crafting, tourism and fishing as the major industries.  In 2009, the Community Development Trust erected Tilly, a 950 kW wind turbine, on the west side of the island. Tilly has been a great success, generating electricity that is sold to the National Grid in return for money that is distributed to community projects via the island’s Windfall Trust.
We joined with researchers from Lancaster University to engage with the island as a case study of how renewable energy might fuel our future. We imagined that their situation, in which a local renewable energy source supplied the community, might help us understand issues such as intermittency that might be replicated at a national scale in a shift from fossil fuels.  What we found on the island upset our expectations, however.  Not only does Tilley supply its power to the National Grid instead of directly to the islanders, but if the mainland supply is cut off -- for instance because the single cable linking the island to the mainland is damaged by a trawler’s nets -- then the turbine must be shut down to avoid overloading the island’s infrastructure.
As we toured the island, we started to realise that rather than serving as an example of energy self-sufficiency, Tiree shows how even seemingly remote communities are enmeshed in networks of technology, economics and politics that mediate the ways energy is used and experienced. And we imagined ways we might design to intervene into their situation, finally producing a series of conceptual proposals we presented to the islanders.  In this paper, we describe the story of our encounter with Tiree, our proposals, and what they teach us about the future of energy demand and supply.

ABSTRACT. If we wish to portray imagined low-carbon futures, we must accomplish two things at once: we must describe a future in which the meanings and competencies which shape our carbon-consumptive practices have changed, but we must simultaneously describe a future in which the technologies and infrastructures which underpin and sustain those practices have also changed. Such work requires a medium and methodology which: can combine the social with the technological; move fluidly between micro, meso and macro scales; reconcile historical trajectories with extrapolated trends and speculative leaps; and – perhaps most importantly – speak across (and beyond) the disciplinary and administrative silos of both the state and the academy.
While any successful strategy for the portrayal of futures is likely to rely on a combination of multiple media and methodologies, I wish to use this paper to make a case for the use of prose fiction narratives, and in particular that genre of prose fiction whose stock-in-trade has always been the portrayal of times other than the present: science fiction.
Science fiction is not without its flaws and foibles, but it has the unique distinction of having developed a toolkit of rhetorics and narrative strategies for the specific purpose of exploring that probability-space which we inaccurately refer to as “the future”. In this paper I will recount a brief history of sociological science fictions and science fictional sociologies, in order to explore some of the advantages and disadvantages of using speculative fictional narratives for purposes other than pure entertainment, before outlining the role this method will take in my own PhD.
I will then turn to the more vexatious and open question(s) of evaluating the resulting futures: which data regarding the past and present should inform these futures? On what criteria should they be evaluated, by whom, and to what end? What risks are attendant on the use of this most subjective (yet potentially persuasive) of forms, and in which discursive spaces might it be most effective? It is my hope that this last (but not necessarily conclusive) chapter of the paper might be written in collaboration with its audience.

ABSTRACT. Researchers developing strategies to help steer social practices have commonly focused their attention on single or bundled everyday practices, such as cycling, bathing, heating or cooling. Here the focus is often on thinking through ways to recruit everyday practitioners into new ways of performing practices, circulate new elements of practice, or disrupt and shift existing everyday activities.  In this paper I am instead interested in possibilities for steering the practices of policy-makers and others seeking to intervene in everyday life to reduce or shift energy demand. In particular, I am concerned with the ways in which future visioning exercises, such as Australia’s Future  Grid Forum (CSIRO 2014) and the UK’s Future Energy Scenarios (National Grid 2015), serve to prioritise a limited suite of steering opportunities at the exclusion of others.

Using examples from these future scenarios, I show how current visions for Australian and UK homes focus on technological possibilities and applications. Households are imagined as sites of technological intervention, with their future practices oriented towards the adoption of or interaction with new energy demand and supply solutions. In contrast, I ask what would happen if visions for the future were based on what practices households are likely to participate in, rather than what technologies they are likely to have and use.

Following this line of thought, the paper presents a ‘stay-at-home pets’ scenario to demonstrate how future pet practices could change the very nature of the energy problems which demand managers seek to address. Depicting different scenarios of future everyday practices opens up new opportunities for steering and shifting demand. In the stay-at-home pets scenario these include distributing low-energy cooling and heating materials for pets, or improving pet access to cool spaces within and around the home through automated dog and cat doors. The paper concludes by suggesting other scenarios of everyday life that could be considered in future visioning exercises to expand the range of steering opportunities available to energy policy-makers and interveners.

ABSTRACT. The study approaches historical, established and emerging forms of shared private vehicle use from a social practice theory perspective. My intention is to extend understandings of how practices of vehicle sharing develop, become established and are reproduced, and to consider their impact on other connected practices. As my PhD is based in the DEMAND Centre, some of the key implications to be drawn out of my analysis will relate to energy demand and carbon mitigation.

ABSTRACT. Recent discourses on ‘sharing economy’ and ‘collaborative consumption’ have brought attention to the theme and concept of ‘sharing’ in everyday life. These discourses discuss sharing as encompassing diverse modes of distribution: contractual renting, lending, borrowing, renting, gifting, bartering and other related concepts. Sharing is rather uncritically presented as a move towards more sustainable lifestyle, an enabler of social relationships resulting in formation of communities of sharers. These discourses neglect the dynamic nature of sociality embedded in practices of sharing. This paper explores sociality of renewable energy sharing within neighbourhoods in context of micro-generation. Micro-generation refers to small-scale energy provisioning system where energy is locally produced, distributed and consumed. The paper approaches sharing of renewable energy as a nexus of ‘energy distributing practices’ and emphasizes dynamic nature of everyday sociality of renewable energy distribution.

While the existing energy research literature focuses heavily on topics of consumption and production, the theme of energy distribution remains neglected. The distribution of renewable energy within neighbourhoods is often limited to ‘trading’ of energy-as-commodity where sociality of energy distribution is ignored. In context of dominant energy provisioning systems in the western world, distribution of energy is frequently structured as ‘commodity exchange’ to balance energy surplus and deficit by buying or selling energy to or from the electricity grid. In contrast, our field studies in rural India demonstrate diverse modes of energy distribution where sociality plays a significant role in everyday dynamics of energy distribution.

The paper reports from ethnographic field studies on solar-lamp sharing services in six villages in Gaya district of Bihar state of eastern India. Bihar is a poverty-stricken state with poor electricity infrastructure. The villages, sites for the field studies, are un-electrified, i.e. these do not receive electric supply from the electricity grid. As a member of solar-lamp sharing service, each village has an ‘energy supplier’ who has access to basic renewable energy infrastructure for charging shared solar-lamps for the village. The sharing of renewable energy within villages is performed on a daily basis with the distribution of charged solar-lamps. The solar-lamp sharing service enables and reconfigures variety of social practices, such as lighting, cooking, dining, sleeping, and shapes local energy demand. The paper discusses diverse modes of energy distribution, shifts in the modes with variation in social context, role of social relations, social exclusion and inclusion as performed in everyday renewable energy sharing. The paper makes an attempt to open a structured discussion on the sociality of sharing that is not apparent in debates on ‘sharing economy’.

ABSTRACT. Sharing a car is one of the most popular expressions of collaborative consumption in Australia’s spatially expansive cities. Moreover, much of the discussion of car sharing, like early popular discourses of collaborative consumption, is celebratory, focusing on its potential to reduce resource use (in this case the private car), and, in so doing, reshape energy demand (in this case for gasoline).  In this paper we critically interrogate these popular assumptions about car sharing, and its potential for changing demand. We do so through a focus on the sharing dimensions of car sharing: what constitutes sharing a car, what facilitates the sharing of a car, and how the materiality of the shared car is understood. We develop an understanding of the materials, meanings and competences of sharing a car based on upon an in-depth qualitative engagement with active members of a large, for-profit car sharing organisation in Sydney, Australia. We first consider the bundling of sharing with other practices, especially those of mobility, but also those of work and parenting, paying particular attention to the intersecting temporalities of these bundles. We secondly consider the multiple sharings that occur in car sharing – not only of the vehicle, but also of infrastructures like roads and parking. We suggest that sharing is ambiguously constituted in the practice of car sharing, and conclude by questioning the extent to which car sharing is collaborative consumption.

ABSTRACT. Some claims regarding the energy benefits of sharing are noted and interrogated, to reveal important principles influencing the energy implications of sharing. It is suggested that particular attention should be given to the linked issues of economic rebound and behavioural norms. The potential for sharing to deliver environmental benefits through impacts on consumer identity is discussed. It is suggested that that coordinated city-scale interventions might more effectively shape norms in ways that enable sharing practices to reduce consumerism and thus cut energy use. Reference is made to emerging 'sharing cities' and the ways in which policy, practice and culture interact to produce diverse modes of engagement with sharing. A 'sharing paradigm' approach is proposed which maps the broad scope of sharing behaviours, enabling researchers and policy makers to engage effectively with all forms of sharing, not just those found in the commercial, intermediated, 'sharing economy'.  Some conclusions are drawn for future research agendas.

ABSTRACT. In response to anthropogenic climate change and potential global resource shortages there is a widespread policy-oriented concern with how individuals and communities can reconfigure their everyday lives and adopt more ‘sustainable lifestyles’ to reduce energy demand. According to this narrative, transport and mobility are central sites of necessary transformation and within the transport and planning fields there is a widespread acceptance of the need to enable more sustainable transport and travel systems and behaviour. What seems less clear is how this sustainable transport future can be realised. Transport modelling and planning rests on assumptions about the pre-determined nature and fixity of individual practices, which  are often modelled as either the outcomes of rational choice or as individualised ‘habits’. Thus, there appears to be little understanding of either the contexts for ‘change’ or of the temporal dynamics of energy demand. Nor is it clear that the social scientific literature on mobilities, where the predominant tendency is to focus on issues of spatiality, sufficiently addresses matters of temporality.

Drawing on a qualitative longitudinal panel study on travel, transport and mobility this paper develops empirical analysis of the patterning and processes of demand over time and at different scales. Specifically, it discusses material collected from the life and mobility history narratives of 245 panel members in Leeds and Manchester in northern England. Part of the larger multidisciplinary Step-Change project (http://www.changing-mobilities.org.uk), this panel study explores, amongst other things, changing travel and transport practices in the everyday and over personal and historical time. This research supports the call for better understandings of the underlying social dynamics and temporalities of demand, over different temporal registers and timescales (Walker 2014) using a variety of methods. It aims to go beyond a focus on conventional life-cycle ‘stages’ favoured by previous attempts at mobility biographies (e.g. Lanzendorf 2003). Instead, we are interested in how a participant’s life may be recalled, recounted and accounted for, in ways that do not always accord with a linear series of causal ‘events’. A number of innovative techniques have been included in the panel study and temporality has been deliberately designed into the research process to make change the focus of analytic attention, drawing attention to the dynamics of demand in relation to mobility. In understanding people’s accounts of their lives we develop the ideas of ‘vernacular temporalities’ (Bastian, Pschetz) and ‘temporal ecologies’ which contain multiple, overlapping and sometimes conflicting values of time.

ABSTRACT. The environmental impact of various ‘unnatural rhythms’ of everyday living has raised the significance of the ‘temporal’ in not only shaping, but also changing diverse energy-demanding social practices (Shove et al, 2009; Rau, 2015). Research has focused on the mutual constitution of time and social practices and the centrality of the latter in not only consuming and producing time, but also allocating it among different complexes of competing practices (Shove, 2009; Southerton, 2003). This paper aims to contribute to such theoretical and empirical enquiries by investigating the multiple temporalities of urban mobility practices that we need to consider for configuring energy-secure futures. Research has underlined the centrality of time in the organisation and ordering of both cities and mobility practices (Urry, 2000; Thrift, 1996). However, mostly, a singular, quantitative understanding of a clock-time ‘monoculture’ prevails, thus ignoring the multiple, qualitative dimensions of time (Geissler, 2002; Svenstrup, 2015). Also, research has underlined the diverse dimensions and perceptions of time in different cultural, geographical and temporal contexts (Gell, 1992). However, it has paid less attention to the possible multiplicity of time perceptions within the same contextual framework (see Southerton, 2012).

Drawing on mobilities research conducted for the Liveable Cities project (see http://liveablecities.org.uk/), this paper aims to unpack the multiple, both chronological and kairological, calculative and qualitative temporalities (Cipriani, 2013; Dewsberry, 2002) of various mobility practices within the same spatio-temporal context of a city. In doing so, it provides an account of different dimensions of time (e.g. speed, weather, seasonality, age, duration, synchronisation, periodicity, frequency, flexibility, disruption, etc.), their interrelationship, as well as traditional dichotomies associated with them (e.g. fast/slow, cold/hot, new/young/old, long/short, empty/full, past/future, day/night, dark/light, etc.). But, it also attempts to challenge the dominant understandings of such temporal dichotomies by indicating the multiplicity of perceptions, associations and values that can be attributed to them (e.g. cycling as both slow and fast, waiting as both productive and unproductive, flexibility associated with both driving and cycling, day as both energy-saving and energy-demanding, sharing practices as both time-demanding and time-saving, etc.). In doing so, it aims to not only contribute to understanding the complex socio-temporal organisation and ordering of mobility systems and practices, but also conceptualise change within them. It thus suggests that low carbon mobility transitions need to also be situated in the changing meanings, perceptions and experiences of the multiple 'temporalities of the social practices’ associated with mobility regimes and routines.

ABSTRACT. It is almost commonplace to declare that the nature of work is changing.  Commentators point to the need for greater synchronization of activities and acceleration of daily life.  Though the daily commute appears to remain a highly stable daily travel activity that has yet to succumb to greater synchronization and acceleration, the daily commute is highly dynamic depending on individual and business sector.  For example, knowledge, innovation and creativity have recently been identified as powerful economic drivers in the US and Europe. In the UK, the creative industries subsector in spite of the well documented economic downturn, has grown significantly in recent years.

Compared to other forms of employment, a defining characteristic of creative workers is flexibility in terms of their working hours and working location.  Though the term flexible worker and knowledge economy remain contested, flexible working practices can be usefully understood as those that enable an individual to have the ability to decide and/or control certain temporally and spatially fixed elements of their work; for example start time and/or location.  Though flexible working practices are invariably contingent in their synchronisation and co-ordination with other temporally and spatially constrained activities like the school-run, dependent care and co-operation with others (partners, colleagues, employers etc.), flexible working practices potentially have enormous implications for shaping the future travel demand, in particular daily 'peak' commute travel. 

This paper critically interrogates flexibility from the perspective of rhythm, synchronisation and periodization by examining flexible working practices of those employed in the creative sector alongside those in other sectors.  Preliminary findings from 30+ qualitative interviews with employees within architecture and accountancy are presented.   Flexible working is unpacked in relation to co-ordination of activities.  Specifically, the dynamic interaction between the daily commute and other household activities is interrogated.  The mobility biography literature has revealed why the car remains central to successfully co-ordinating and planning daily travel activities.  The flexibility of the car is central to daily urban life’s synchronization and acceleration challenges.  Yet, questions remain as the extent to which flexible working practices help reassemble, reorganise or change the co-ordination of activities, reduce travel, or help increase uptake of non-car commutes.  Though informed by the mobility biography literature, this paper draws from theories of practice to uncover avenues into how flexibility of working practices can have positive impacts on reducing overall travel demand and encourage greater opportunities for lower carbon travel for the journey to work.

ABSTRACT. Due to the increasing costs, transport demand and the climate change, the importance of energy efficiency is increasing. The highest proportion of energy consumed in the railway is the so called traction energy. This energy is required for the train run between two stops. Railway traffic is managed by timetables. Consequently as long as the punctuality is assured the timetable design plays a decisive role on the energy consumption and its allocation over time.

In railway transport, the energy consumption will be for periods of 15 minutes by energy supplier measured. Load peaks may occur in these periods due to the changes in train numbers or other factors. These peaks cause high costs for the railway operators because of the price policy of energy supplier.

Energy consumption peaks are partially inevitable due to the timetable design. The most significant factor is naturally the number of trains in a period of 15 minutes, which is based on the transport demand and cannot be affected without changing the already existing and valid timetable. On the contrary, the train speed and acceleration, which are also significant factors especially for high-speed railway transport, can be so adjusted that the load peaks due to the train runs can be avoided. Hence this study focuses on these factors’ influences on the energy consumption and gives recommendations about the speed profiles. The objective is to verify the significance of factor train speed and acceleration.

ABSTRACT. How is the demand for new, detached homes built and how does it persist over generations? Houses arguably shape and are shaped by the domestic routines and everyday practices of householders. The co-constitutive nature of domestic practices and the materiality of the house (bathrooms, kitchens, indoor and outdoor space) appears to sustain a process of ratcheting up – simultaneously affecting social expectations and the hardware of the home itself.  This presents considerable obstacles to change towards low-energy or more sustainable housing; both conceptually in the meanings attached to the idea of ‘home’ and in the material form of detached houses.

ABSTRACT. Over recent decades new types of digital products, infrastructures and services have become increasingly relevant to a wide range of practices at home and on the move. In broad terms, this points to an expanding 'system of connectivity’, which has implications for patterns of global energy demand. To explore how this expansion is taking place, this paper focuses on the emergence of Wi-Fi and tablet technologies in the UK, primarily within households. It combines secondary data from a range of surveys conducted by Ofcom with qualitative data from a set of interviews with iPad owners undertaken in 2014. It describes a sequence of shifting relationships in which Wi-Fi, first, became established in UK households through association with laptops. This helped to create conditions in which tablets could thrive. Yet these conditions are also based in existing and well-established practices, such as watching TV and film, into which tablets have been integrated. Finally, we consider some of the ways in which tablets, groups of new practitioners, particular practices and Wi-Fi may be coming together in mutually reinforcing relationships that further extend the ‘system of connectivity’ to new places and practitioners.

ABSTRACT. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork of selected working and mobility practices within three large UK hospitals, this paper develops the position that the multi-scalar rhythms of practice that make up hospital life intersect and interact continuously. Rather than developing an account of how fixed temporal orders might change, this work shows that hospital life is never static. It argues that the emergence, maintenance and disappearance of working and mobility practices depends on (and constitutes) varying degrees of rigidity and flexibility in the hospitals’ temporal rhythms.