ABSTRACT. Technology is infused with scripts that indicate how we as users should behave around, live in or use an artefact. Drawing inspiration from literature discussing user scripts and gender scripts, we develop the notion of energy scripts. We tentatively define the concept of energy scripts as the way the distribution of light, heat and power within a building choreographs its functional use and stimulates or discourages energy use. We apply this concept to buildings, to analyse if and how the energy demand of buildings is choreographed by architectural design.
In the literature, scripts are also investigated in a normative setting. Designers, such as engineers or architects, embed their worldviews into artefacts thus providing an opportunity where scripts ‘materialize morality’. However, users are not necessarily the passive receptacles of these embedded scripts; they have opportunities to ignore, resist or even redesign built artefacts.
In European architectural design, it can be seen in the middle ages that the situation of rooms was such that important functions –such as writing manuscripts - could profit from heat produced in the kitchen. Moreover, the distribution of warmth followed the division of labour and class lines, as servant’s quarters were unheated. Modern houses also have energy-scripts, for example kitchens are designed for housing separate appliances, instead of using cool storage. The use of technology for heating and lighting is ubiquitous in modern buildings, while the need to reduce energy demand often leads to the installation of even more technology, smart or otherwise. On the other hand, ‘passive design’ demonstrates that it is quite possible to design buildings that need almost no energy for heating. Furthermore, new ‘daylighting’ technologies bring natural light to the darkest spaces. Historically, there have been ‘paths not taken’, which could have led to a less energy demanding built environment. Retracing these paths can lead to new perspectives on building design and retrofit.
Researching the concept of energy-scripts we contribute to our understanding of the constraints and flexibilities for reduced energy demand in buildings. Our approach also sheds light on the social construction of the ‘resident’ or ’house consumer’ as an end-user. Investigating implicit expectations regarding energy use, which could ultimately assist in designing building scripts that specifically invite energy efficient use of a building.

ABSTRACT. This paper seeks to engage with the workshop theme “steering demand” by drawing attention to the neoliberal agenda and its promotion of markets as a means to drive and direct demand. According to this agenda, markets are the most efficient mean to steer energy demand, provided that adequate incentives and market designs are set in place. In this approach to markets, the complex and collective sense of demand is lost,it is reduced to rational consumer behaviour.
The “smart grid” is a locus of such reconceptions of energy demand management. Smart grid shall make it easier to bring real-time signals about the grid status to the end-user. Combined with market discourses, it has given way to the idea of “demand-response” which consists in an economically-motivated (price signals) and quick-paced response of end-users to grid needs. The corresponding “responsive consumer” is a consumer amenable to price incentive who contributes to peak load shading by shifting his/her demand and uses in time.
This paper follows the controversy about the design of a tiny portion of the French smart meter. It explores how end-users are defined as electricity consumers and the agency they are endowed with. Following suit with social history and cultural theory approaches of consumption but with an ANT twist, we consider consumers as constructed figures. We examine “the making of the consumer” in a very literal sense, that of the material and technical devices through which an alleged “consumer behaviour” is inscribed.
At least three versions of the responsive consumer struggle to be inscribed in the French smart meter. Two of them convey a consumer defined by individual preferences, individual action and rational optimisation: the “energy saving consumer” (alike the “attitude, behaviour, choice” paradigm of energy efficiency [Shove]) and the (economic theory and market) “rational chooser”. The third version is the attached consumer, largely captive of elaborate market offers and marketing devices, who unwillingly relinquishes his power to suppliers (Cochoy, Trompette).
The struggle to inscribe the consumer in the meter also is a struggle to define how the market should work. We follow the way in which different theories and practices of market construction become interwoven in and around the technical design of the French smart meter and inscribe a figure of the electricity consumer in this design. Whereas the « smart grid » vision advocated in French/EU policy documents and grey literature celebrates the advent of a « smart » consumer, the process we analyse results in the decision to not directly deliver basic price information to the French electricity consumer.
This paper brings to the discussion of markets as means of steering demand a concrete case study and a critical appraisal of how markets and consumers are constructed.

ABSTRACT. Co-housing is an emerging trend in Europe, raising interest as innovator of housing and sustainable environmental technology. Co-housing residents are receptive to innovations in renewable energies and apply ecological materials as well as waste- and water recycling together with alternative forms of management. Through co-housing practices residents move from being ‘consumer’ to ‘(co-) producers’, of housing, care, energy, services and so on. Based on recent research on co-housing in EU member states as well as field studies in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, Spain and the UK, it becomes clear that co-housing initiatives can be considered as pioneers for energy-transition. Nevertheless, the value and contribution of co-housing initiatives to housing provision and sustainable urban development, both quantitative and qualitatively, have hardly been assessed. Nor is there any insight in questions such as: what are optimal dimensions for co-housing from an energetic point of view? What is the weight of location choice on the energy performance of a project? In how far does clustering and lay-out really based on energy- and environmental ambitions?
Compared to tradition housing provision, and to single-unit building, to share the building volume and manage the climate installations holds extra opportunities to optimize the energy-household, for example: creating critical mass to enable investments, organise collective learning or divide tasks in managing and monitoring.

This paper focuses on the energy-demand related to the built form. Energy calculation models depart from standard patterns of use and distribution of rooms, to which the co-housing cluster may not fit. For example how to take into account the shared use of room for dinner, film-screening or play, or equipment such as washing machines and electrical tools? The paper first presents the approaches that have been taken so far to interpret the ecological orientations of self-managed, clustered housing. It then looks at the benefits and bottlenecks of collective energy engineering such as in the design, management and maintenance of technology for water purification and solar panels. Thirdly it introduces the difficulties in EP calculation and benchmarking. The outcome of the research concludes that the reduction of energy-demand and the application of renewable sources can be considered as a direct outcome of the social architecture of co-housing. Reduction of energy demand can only be successful when the self-management aspects are taken more into account during design and engineering phases.

continuation of:
Tummers, Lidewij (2013): “Co-Housing: Pioneers of Eco-Engineering.” Tarragona: ENHR, 2013. http://www.enhr2013.com/paper-submission/list-of-papers/.

ABSTRACT. The Biovallée, a large scale area of political cooperation (102 municipalities, southern France), ambitionned in 2009 to become a ‘rural Freibourg’, and get a financial support (10 M€ from the Region, 5M€ from the department of Drôme) to develop such an experimental place for high standard solutions about renewables and efficiency buildings. Local competencies with national involvment in alternative energy netwoks and national policy processes were located in the Biovallée :Enertech, an engineering office specialised in thermal simulations and involved in several pionneering experiments in efficiency buildings ; the négaWatt Institute, dedicated to training, research and engineering studies about energy efficiency solutions. The director of Enertech, involved in the Grenelle de l’Environnement in 2007, failed to promote in this arena the idea that the refurbishment of residential buildings could be a legal requirement. The Biovallée project raised for him the opportunity to test an alternative ‘market’ solution through the making of global low energy retroffitting offer for private owners.

This model consists in assembling the local officers as energy advisors, with craftsmen collectives as coherent entities (38 companies) to propose energy and cost efficiency solutions, and the experts (Enertech, négaWatt) as trainers and conductors. This creates a new agency through which the private owners are empowered so as to strategically choose how to make the appropriate investment for the better energy efficiency solution. Thus, two key emerging dimensions unsually gathered are adjusted through this new sociotechnical assemblage, one of decentralisation of the housing policy, one of marketisation of the energy-efficient refurbishment issues of private housings still today neglected by the building sector.

Thanks to interviews and participant observations, we have followed the deployment of this experiment and propose to analyse to which extent the social and territorial organisations involved in it condition the emergence of new energy efficiency potentials. Using the conceptual approach of the sociology of market agencement (Callon), we propose the notion of « space of market coordination » in order to discuss the influence of space (materiality, proximity, relationality) in this innovative experiment and in competing views of what this emerging market should be (a « grounded » market depending on local regulations and attachments or a « smooth » market based on standard offers of refurbishment).

ABSTRACT. In the present context of « globalisation era » and massive population movements from different southern countries to northern Europe, we are interested in a specific aspect of the migrant acculturation experience, that is the situation of people discovering a new way of accessing  energy services in a different national context and the cross influences between territories and cultures.
A transnational migration literature has developed since the 90s (Bredeloup, 2007; Safin, 2007; Kuczynski & Razy, 2009) and has showed the plurality of Sub-Saharian African migrants ; the Congolese diaspora in Europe has been studied (Garbin & Godin, 2013 ; Pambu & Garbin, 2009 ; Chabrol, 2013). But the specific energetical  issues have not received much scholarly attention. Our collective work aims to propose trails of reflexion.
Through a specific local survey (Kadundu & al., 2015), the case of the energy access situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo especially in Sud Kivu area has been studied in the frame of a partnership with the Bukavu catholic University (energy resources, infrastructures, relationship between poverty and energy uses of the households).
A second inquiry takes place within the frame of EDF R&D « Fuel poverty project ». It is conducted among different actors in charge of the immigration and integration issues in France (« hometown » associations, social workers, mediation structures)  and explore different kinds of impacts of cross cultural situations of the Congolese migrants in France (Marseille and Paris area).
Our paper will study :
- (1) first, the way their original conditions of life and the new « deterritorialized » world where the migrants live impact the way they deal with the energetical issues in everyday life : that is the relationship with the supplier, the different energy uses in the apartment, legal and illegal share practises, demand management, willingness to pay...);
- (2) secondly, the way public authorities in charge with migration issues, social workers  and energy suppliers deal with this specific kind of integration policy and fight against fuel poverty ;
- (3) How the concept of « fuel poverty » needs to be reconceptualised to fit these cross-borders situations.

ABSTRACT. Matthew Herington
Energy & Poverty Research Group, UQ Energy Initiative
The University of Queensland

This paper discusses key learnings from an exploratory study on types of change occurring in energy related cook stove practice in rural India. Sharing these learnings is important for moving forward a research agenda on understanding how social practices such as cooking – and associated energy use behaviour – emerge, persist and change over time. The research draws on practice theory and contemporary literature on structure and agency to help make sense of how and why people use different energy fuels to achieve cook stove related demands. The study used an exploratory mixed methods approach, which was employed in two rural villages located in the Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh, India. Preliminary findings reveal powerful structures at play that appear to ‘lock-in’ existing cooking practice, while also identifying innovations in practice that have emerged from complex agency-structure relationships. In order to further explore these findings and gain meaningful insight for the design of policies and interventions aiming to enact a social change, a greater depth of research is recommended to better understand how cooking related energy practices co-evolve over time.

ABSTRACT. This presentation seeks to interrogate the resistance of the large technical network model of electricity delivery in a context where very high tariffs might provide a temptation for the newly formed middle classes to adopt decentralised electricity production units in order to reduce their dependency on the grid. The dominant model of service delivery is characterised by large production units delivering electricity through transportation and interconnected distribution grids. It has been considered the most efficient way to provide electricity to a large number of customers for a long time, but the high tariffs in Metro Manila, the Philippines, can lead to a reconsideration of this premise.

In order to answer this question, the presentation first focuses on middle classes — which are often considered as the engines of a change in the energy landscape of emerging countries. Their coherence as a social group is debated, and their electricity uses and practices are described. When it appears that no movement towards a weakening of the large technical network model can be observed, the presentation investigates the reasons that can account for this inertia of the energy system.

ABSTRACT. Impelled by the looming threat of anthropogenic climate change, the rise of technological solutions for energy insecurities have illuminated imperatives to harness energy “smartly” from renewable sources. Drawing transdisciplinary literature on the cultural politics of energy into conversation with the anthropology of infrastructure and political ecology, this paper analyzes the material and discursive dimensions of the push towards technological solutions of energy demand in ecologically fragile contexts. Taking seriously local entanglements with global modernity as more than simply catching up with the “developed” world, this paper considers the complex processes by which energy in/securities in small-island states such as Mauritius are rendered technological under the rhetoric of network “improvement” (Li 2007). By resisting the urge to examine technologically-driven sustainable development as simply a discursive project, I trace how developing green energy projects in the Global South create at once changing energyscapes with emergent technocratic regimes while palpably altering lived experiences for stakeholders involved. Querying such forces is key for understanding how local actors substantiate (Choy 2011), resist or internalize new ecological imaginaries in unanticipated ways (see Hathaway 2013).

In particular, this paper focuses on an emergent class of energy producers and consumers, termed “prosumers,” in Mauritius. Complicating the perceived boundary between supply and demand, these “prosumer” groups offer new ways of theorizing developing trends in electricity production while dramatically altering how energy is conceived, imagined and contested in various cultural settings. By tracing how energy produced at the interface between global capitalist impulses and local iterations of sustainability discourse in the age of the anthropocene, this paper will address: (1) how energy and environment are conceptualized around diverging ideas of “ecological sustainability” and “economic growth;” (2) how the changing relationships between energy supply and demand disturb the material environments where stakeholders work and live; and (3) the material and technological dimensions of green energy futures.

ABSTRACT. Reducing energy demand in dwellings is an important component of meeting carbon reduction targets. The drivers of this demand are linked to occupant practices, varying greatly between people and locations. Heating, as the main component of energy demand in dwellings in the UK, is often associated with thermal comfort, defined in ASHRAE 55 as the ‘condition of mind which expresses satisfaction with the thermal environment’. How do people fulfil that condition in their homes? What is deemed as reasonable or excessive thermal comfort practice? This paper explores how residents living in social housing blocks are heating their homes and to what extent their practices may be influenced by heating charges. This study is focusing on three social housing buildings located in Portsmouth, two with communal heating charges (blocks A and B) and one without (block C). Using a mixed-methods approach, data were collected using environmental monitoring, semi-structured interviews and questionnaires. Results show that there is a relationship between the indoor air temperature profiles in living room and communal heating management strategy and the choice of individual heating control settings. This implies that the low-cost heating supply to some occupants may have led to constantly high indoor air temperature, which in turn may result in thermal adaptation to these high temperatures and raise occupants’ thermal expectations. On the other hand, occupants in the building without communal heating charges appear unable to afford the high costs of heating in their poorly insulated homes. The conclusions point out that an on-site informed assessment of established occupancy conditions and practices should precede any decisions on energy efficiency measures, as simplified, generic occupancy related assumptions usually disregard such important thermal comfort related processes.

ABSTRACT. Some UK households and individuals use vastly more energy than others.  Nationally, reducing personal demand for energy is an important part of meeting the commitment to reduce carbon emissions. However, despite occasional attempts to identify and stigmatise particularly ‘excessive’ gadgets or activities, energy policy has not been framed around reducing excessive consumption. By bringing empirical evidence about variations in energy consumption together with the history of policy debate on limiting energy use, this paper considers whether concepts such as excessive or luxury consumption can form the basis for policy.

An overview of empirical data, based on existing statistics and surveys, provides context. This shows that energy use in the home and for personal transport varies hugely between households and individuals in the UK, even within the same income decile. A brief historical survey, both in terms of averages and variation across the population, shows changing patterns of consumption, including recent reductions in residential energy demand. The evidence demonstrates that the difference in consumption between low and high energy using households is just over a factor of two, and that household energy consumption rises much less strongly with income, than, say, transport energy use.

The history of UK policy engagement with limiting energy consumption is described, with most attention paid to residential energy use. Case studies of policy proposals to constrain high consumption illustrate how these ideas have been considered. Cases include rising block tariffs, standing charges and energy tariffs, and arguments about the proper basis for EU product energy labels and minimum standards (efficiency versus absolute consumption). These suggestions for policy re-orientation have not been adopted in the UK, where most current residential energy policy is based on efficiency. However, some elements of policy are based on consumption, and these are briefly described.

In the discussion, these different types of evidence are brought together. Policy based on consumption could be designed in a number of different ways. It could focus on individuals and households, or on products and homes, or a combination of both. For households, policy could aim to reduce consumption across the whole population, or focus primarily on high consuming households. There are a number of reasons - from the pragmatic to the principled - for focusing on high consumption, but as yet little understanding of what this might mean in policy terms. Many interesting questions remain as to whether a focus on high consumption should have a place within residential energy policy.

ABSTRACT. A household is fuel poor when it is unable to afford the level of energy services required to allow its members to live a decent life. This means that a household underconsumes energy, with resulting health and social impacts. Under the UK coalition government (2010-2015), John Hills' review produced a new working definition of fuel poverty. In Europe, the UK is widely considered to be leading this agenda, and the Hills definition has been adopted by several governments. The change in definition is an interesting moment in the idea of fuel poverty, which will have an impact on fuel poverty policy and action in multiple nations.
In this paper, I analyse this change to the definition of fuel poverty using a framework derived from Nicholas Rose's work on subjectivity. The objective here is to understand the politics of fuel poverty through this change in definition, more specifically to understand how this change intersects with broader energy and poverty politics. My analysis will uncover how the fuel poor are understood as subjects of policy, how fuel poverty is problematised and explained and which authorities are called on in the process, how this aligns with broader government strategies, and how this is enacted through technologies of government.  The material under analysis here is the Hills review itself, and surrounding documentation, including policy documents arising from the review, responses from external parties and key publications that influenced the direction of the review.
The use of a critical lens results in some interesting insights. The distinction between poverty and fuel poverty made by Hills (and many others), has an impact on the strategies and technologies used by government to address this issue. Energy efficiency measures are favoured over measures that address income inequality. The attempt to reduce the effects of energy prices on the official measure of fuel poverty (in a context in which prices doubled from 2005-2011) belies a reluctance to challenge the liberalisation of the energy market. The austerity maxim of 'helping those most in need' is also highly evident in the review,  suggesting that a present day need to reduce costs is being written into the longer lasting conceptualisation of the problem.
This paper's key contribution is to offer a critical analysis of the formation of fuel poverty policy. This reveals a host of political judgements or assumptions about the relative importance of poverty, environment and economics.

ABSTRACT. This paper introduces the Invisible Energy Policy project (mentioned above) and presents initial findings from the higher education sector. It compares energy and non-energy policies in the same sector, and provides some insight into how these are enacted ‘on the ground’.

ABSTRACT. Smart grids (are considered to) provide a promising new impulse for the energy transition. They make room for more decentralised forms of energy innovation, and reflect a new kind of transition dynamics that operates at the interface between the home and the energy grid. Smart grid innovations therefore require a different, more decentralised and situated approach to transition governance. Drawing upon practice theories, this paper outlines a conceptual framework for analysing the new connections between the home and decentralised smart energy grids. In doing so this paper seeks to contribute to the emerging body of literature that explores the intersections between transition theories and practice theories. The framework ascribes an orchestrating role to ‘e-practices’ which are considered to assume a central mediating role in transition governance. We also argue that, for the future of the energy transition, it is important to specify sustainability goals at decentral levels and to link these goals to a selected set of decentralised and domestic e-practices.

ABSTRACT. This paper explores how practices can be steered through utilisation of a practice theory approach that looks at machines, bodies and their linkages through diverse interfaces and infrastructures. The paper outlines the implications for steering under both machanic and experimental regimes.

ABSTRACT. There is widespread agreement that households’ electricity consumption should be flexible in order to balance demand and supply in the future smart grid. One approach to demand-side management is to time shift households’ consumption through economic incentives. This paper explores the experiences from a Danish household trial that combined static time-of-use pricing with electric vehicles.

On the basis of the empirical findings from qualitative interviews, the paper discusses what role materiality plays in the interviewed households’ experiences with time shifting their electricity-consuming practices. The interviews indicate that in particular practices where some of the activities are delegated to technologies (automatized) are most likely to be time shifted. Examples of these practices are dishwashing (with delegation of activities to dishwashers), laundering (the washing machine and tumble dryer) and EV-charging (use of timers). The empirical observations point to an interesting interplay between the practitioners’ bodily involvement in practices and the delegation of specific activities (tasks) to machines, which also relates to a more general discussion of (semi-)automatization.

In addition, the empirical findings indicate that not only the specific design of technologies but also the general materiality and physical layout of the home influence to what extent the households did time shift their practices. This also points to the importance of recognising how everyday practices of households are spatially embedded and how the time shifting of some practices might interfere negatively with other practices.

The empirical findings open up for theoretical reflections about the relationship between human and non-human actants and how this influences possible strategies for time shifting the electricity demand. As part of this, the concept of distributed agency within assemblages of practice could prove a useful concept in understanding and analysing time shifting of households’ electricity consumption.

ABSTRACT. A prominent strategy in reducing energy consumption in dwellings has been to remove ‘the user’ from the operation of the building and its systems as far as possible. Occupants and their ‘inconvenient’ behaviour are seen as uncertainties to be set outside the loop. Recent research conducted by the authors suggests that this may not be the most effective strategy for two main reasons. First, many people demonstrate a sensitivity to their thermal environments, a clear understanding of what they want from them, and the ability to operate their homes to achieve those conditions. Second, when users’ are thwarted in their attempts to create desired thermal experiences there is a risk they will bypass controls and constraints – for example, by using portable electric heaters – resulting in significantly greater energy consumption than expected. This paper suggests that some occupants have a deeper understanding of how their homes work thermally than is usually acknowledged in top-down imposed energy interventions that limit the occupants’ control of their home environment. The authors will argue that users’ intuitive understanding often exceeds the capabilities of automated or ‘black box’ heating control systems by embracing control mechanisms, such as windows and doors, that are not normally considered part of the whole environmental control system.

The paper will draw on the results of an EPSRC-funded research project, Conditioning Demand: Older People, Diversity and Thermal Experience, in which the authors studied older householders’ attitudes to the introduction of low carbon technologies to provide heating. Their responses show a sophisticated understanding of the thermal environment. The results from this project and others, such as Carbon, Control and Comfort: User-centred control systems for comfort, carbon saving and energy management, suggest there is a need to investigate people’s understanding of how buildings work and the skills they acquire in getting the best from their homes to provide the thermal conditions they want. The paper will explore the division of agency between people, building designs and systems in creating desired thermal environments. It positions occupants as end users as the primary intelligence in operating homes and their energy systems and calls for greater recognition of the role of end-users in the efficient and effective operation of thermal systems in the home. The paper argues that by exploiting people’s intuitive understanding of how buildings work will inform effective low carbon strategies to reduce household energy consumption.

ABSTRACT. The Trondheim living lab is a newly built detached single family home that is planned to reach a zero emission balance over the course of its lifetime. This is achieved by a broad variety of technical strategies such as passive and active energy design and efficient installations. The degree of automation of the building's environmental services (such as heating, cooling, ventilation, and light) has been left open to be able to test different control scenarios: manual, automatic and several modes combining both approaches.

In the first wave of qualitative experiments conducted in the laboratory between September 2015 and March 2016 six different groups are invited to live in the house for 25 days each. During this time, the script - i.e. the programs controlling the building according to ideal indoor environmental and energetic conditions - is kept as stable as possible. At the same time a user override is provided where applicable. Based on direct observation (mainly through sensors registering temperature, humidity, CO2 levels, light levels, presence, energy use, airing), and interviews before, during and after the stay, compliance and deviation from the script is registered and analysed along the dimensions of skill, meanings, and technology.

The goal of this analysis is twofold: First, we aim to provide a detailed account of which expected or unexpected occupant actions matter in which way for the resulting energy consumption of a high performance zero emission building. The second goal is conceptual: We revisit concepts like scripts and anti-programs (e.g. Akrich 1992; Latour 1992), domestication (e.g. Silverstone & Hirsch 1992; Sørensen 2006), and social practice (e.g. Schatzki et al. 2001; Reckwitz 2002) and explore their ability to shed light on occupants' interactions with automated domestic environments.

ABSTRACT. Although only around one fifth of the population in the UK live in rural areas, the rural dweller’s energy demand is likely to be higher than that of their urban counterpart (e.g. Ecofys, 2011). Reasons for this include greater travel distances due to dispersed populations and services, older and harder-to-heat housing, lack of grid connection and less efficient fuels.
Most UK rural areas also have a higher proportion of retirees, including those in the highest age bands. While elders might be generally assumed limited in their energy consumption by factors such as smaller dwellings, static and dwindling retirement incomes and pressure to conserve resources in the face of longer lifespans, sizeable sections of the rural older population do not fit this profile. For example, the early retired are more likely to engage in highly mobile life-styles (e.g. Berg et al., 2015). At the other end of the age group, the association between higher age, especially age 85 and over, with circulatory disorders and other health impediments as well as loss of mobility, has implications of greater numbers of hours spent indoors, longer hours using domestic heat and light and potential need for higher temperatures to achieve thermal comfort.
To explore older rural people’s energy demand, this paper reanalyses qualitative data gathered between 2006 and 2009 in three regions of North East England, for an ESRC/DCLG-funded doctoral study which explored the suitability of rural settlements as places to grow older in terms of the social, physical and policy environment (Brooks, 2011). The paper contextualises this through a review of other studies and surveys of older people’s and rural dwellers current and likely future energy use (e.g. Hamza and Gilroy 2011; Age UK, 2015). It concludes with a reflection on the likely implications for older people of projected developments in rural energy futures, including more community renewable energy projects, a larger electric fleet, driverless cars, cheaper domestic solar power and the coming to retirement of a cohort of more environmentally aware and digitally connected elders.

References
Age UK (2015) The Future of Transport in an Ageing Society. Online. Available at: http://www.ageuk.org.uk/Documents/EN-GB/For-professionals/Research/The_Future_of_Transport_in_an_Ageing_Society.pdf?dtrk=true (accessed 25/09/2015).
Berg, J., Levin, L, Abramsson, M., Hagberg, J-E. (2015) ‘I want complete freedom: car use and everyday mobility among the newly retired’, European Transport Research Review,7:31. DOI 10.1007/s12544-015-0180-6
Brooks, E. (2011) ‘Are country towns and villages sustainable environments for older people?’. Unpublished PhD thesis. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Newcastle University.
Ecofys (2011) Rural energy in Europe: country studies for France, Germany, Italy, Poland and the UK. Utrecht, Netherlands: Ecofys.
Hamza, N. and Gilroy, R. (2011) ‘The challenge to UK energy policy: An ageing population perspective on energy saving measures and consumption’, Energy Policy, 39  (2), 782-789.

ABSTRACT. Living Lab is a two bedroomed detached house on the edge of the university campus in Trondheim. It is also a research laboratory which is testing state of the art technology committed to achieving Zero emissions within a 100m2 dwelling. The first qualitative experiment in Living Lab will take place from September 2015 to April 2016, when six different resident groups comprising of two to four people, will make Living Lab their home for a period twenty-five days each. The resident groups were chosen because they are associated with three basic demographic categories; students under 30 who are already cohabiting, families with small children and couples around the age of sixty. The resident groups are otherwise different in terms of hobbies, interests, academic and job related background. Their permanent homes are also different; they live in student housing, apartments, detached houses, in urban and rural areas. Participant observation and interviews will be used to gather empirical information before; during and after the six residence periods in Living Lab. This will provide detailed insight into the physical and technical qualities, meaningful and symbolic associations, and everyday practices in both their permanent homes and in Living Lab.
The concept of home suggests both social and physical space; it is also often a major source of identity for men and women. At the same time it is often an idealised model and not a true picture of how people actually live (Munro &Madigan, 1999). The use and understanding of a home that is established is often a negotiation between what is suggested by the physical space and the needs of the social space imposed by family life or other relational activities. The insight gathered in Living Lab will provide understanding of how the concept of home can be established within a highly technical setting and the implications this has for the use of the technology being tested in Living Lab.

ABSTRACT. Studies concerned with understanding society’s use of resource-intensive energy rarely focus on the part of everyday life that may broadly be categorised as leisure. Among the things people do within this, running stands as one of the most popular exercise activities in the country (Sport England 2015). While there may be endless possibilities for where running may be practiced, indoor sites (on treadmills in gyms) and outdoor sites represent qualitatively different ‘material environments’, and this distinction has consequences for understanding the nature of participation in running and for how space is implicated in practice.

This speculative paper begins by setting out two ways of conceptualising participation in indoor and outdoor running. The first takes a ‘birds eye view’ approach, whereby maps of where people run and the layout of gyms are privileged as a means of conveying the nature of participation in running. While this caricatured approach may be drawn upon to inform how running may be provisioned for, it is argued that it writes out important ways in which the practice is experienced. The second, by contrast, draws on materialised accounts of practice (Reckwitz 2002; Shove et al. 2012) to foreground running as the central unit of analysis. While there is a consensus that ‘materials’ play a constitutive role in practice, different accounts takes this notion in various directions. In this second approach ‘dubbed dynamic material environments’, a broad range of phenomena are taken to be constitutive of practice, including the weather, light conditions and infrastructure, as well as clothing and equipment, and are taken to always be interaction with each other.

The paper then discusses these ideas in relation an empirical project concerned with how people experience ‘everyday’ indoor and outdoor running in Bristol and Lancaster. 

ABSTRACT. This is the tentative title/topic for a presentation on the findings from the DEMAND linkage project, which focuses on energy demand in Southeast Asia. Besides presenting some preliminary findings, we will also reflect on similarities and differences between doing research in Europe/UK and in Southeast Asia. More details will follow later.

ABSTRACT. All across Europe we find local citizens initiatives that aspire to creating a low-carbon community.  This involves both reducing energy demand as well as producing renewable energy. Indeed, these initiatives often find out very quickly that energy neutral ambitions can only be realized when they tackle the demand side first. A related issue is the balancing of local energy demand with local production.
Activities undertaken by energy initiatives often include programmes for insulation, or target behavioural changes. Presently, in Germany a substantial part of the production of renewable energy is contributed by citizen-owned production units, installed and managed individually or by local communities.
In the literature we find multiple studies into various aspects of local energy communities. We performed a literature search on community energy, focusing on those studies that explicitly relate to citizens initiatives. Local transitions to energy-neutral or low-carbon communities have been researched primarily by analysing cases.  This paper attempts to review these case studies and to draw conclusions on what theoretical perspectives are used, to what extent commonalities can be found in these cases, and how to proceed to better understand patterns of local energy transitions.
An interesting aspect is the impact of national innovation and energy policy on the economic and social environment of local initiatives. In our review we found a limited number of cross-country studies, which shed light on these impacts. Furthermore, we analyse our set of case studies to compare the successes and failures of cases in the countries under consideration.
Transition studies often are multi-disciplinary, in that they are informed by economy, history, psychology, sociology, environmental studies, engineering and other disciplines.  In our paper we investigate which theoretical approaches are used to study community energy, and what these approaches accomplish.

ABSTRACT. China has facilitated and witnessed the growth of one of the world’s largest economies, and through its focus on production these past decades has amassed an energy footprint that is one of the largest in the world. While household energy and water consumption has been steadily rising in China, per capita consumption rates remain much lower than within European and other Western contexts. However, this energy and water demand is, and is projected to continue, rising rapidly particularly in urban areas. One important aspect of the increasing demand of water and energy is the dynamic social and material landscape of cities, regions and households which are influencing mundane everyday practices such as laundry, and personal bathing. Unlike Western countries inequities between the rural and urban poor and ‘the rest’ of Chinese society are becoming increasingly more pronounced as the economy develops, influencing the patterns of production and provision, and the sustainability of various mundane everyday practices. Alongside the transformations of material infrastructures of cities and households are a changing set of expectations – for example in regards to expectations of cleanliness and comfort – as well as changing sets of practices related to cleanliness in everyday lives. This has been supported by the development of a concept of public health called weisheng throughout the early twentieth century which ties the building of the nation state to a biopolitical, and particularly Chinese, understanding of the healthy body, hygiene, and public health. This is expressed in contemporary China in various multiple, hybrid hygienic modernities across Chinese urban spaces. This paper provides a brief account of the histories, trajectories and patterns of water using practices related to personal bathing, laundry and cleanliness in China. It reflects upon a literature review that explores the dynamics of changing social and material urban landscapes in China. It also is a call for people interested in research on DEMAND to not just apply conceptual understandings of practice and change to the Global South, but to develop nuanced, geographically bounded ideas of practice and sustainability that connect to the multiple local realities, and social, material and political dynamics.

ABSTRACT. The role of communities has been identified as significant in the future success of Europe’s, and indeed Ireland’s, transition towards a decarbonised energy system. However, community structures and compositions in Ireland are varied and culturally disparate, obscuring appropriate sustainable energy transition pathways. At the community level, there are different understandings of, and attitudes to, sustainability and energy use. This is particularly evident in island communities where social interactions, activities and services are compositionally divergent from those in mainland communities. Demand and perceptions of energy are place-based, thus island energy needs and infrastructures differ culturally from mainland ones. Within these peripheral communities the conventional “one-size-fits-all” national approach to community engagement and public consultation has proved unsuccessful. This paper argues that prevailing practices promoting and recognising expert knowledge over local knowledge fosters a community engagement process that is inattentive and indifferent to the distinctive and divergent needs of island communities. Indifferent engagement processes discourage community participation and demoralises those actively seeking to engage. This paper reports how predominant universal-policy approaches to community consultation are further marginalising periphery or island communities where, typically, local knowledge is highly valued. It does so through an island-based case study analysis of Inis Oírr Island, in the Aran Islands, in the West of Ireland. Drawing on a social-constructivist perspective this paper assesses how current generic approaches to community consultation can be redefined to include inclusiveness of all knowledge in the complex energy issue. Advancing previous literature, the results from this empirical study with residents in Inis Oírr, identified three specific processes where situated energy knowledges mould perceptions and understanding of energy governance: the role of the community’s periperality in shaping its energy governance structures; their geographic and climate based experiences and household energy adaptations to account for them and finally the community’s previous experiences of external energy governance structures and how this affects their levels of participation. Overall, this paper contributes to a better understanding of pathways to achieving a more collaborative, transparent, balanced and co-creative community energy transition process that can better adapt to the atypical energy needs of island communities.

ABSTRACT. Economic growth is prescribed by many schools of economic thought as a remedy for scarcity and a route to social progress. Accordingly, the requirement to maintain growth is a central input to energy policy formation process. For instance, the rate of anticipated economic growth is a pivotal factor in the levels of future energy demand that are forecast by energy systems models. Much of modern energy system planning is done with a default understanding that economic growth is an essential feature of the system, leading to conflict with the need to drastically curb carbon emissions.

The goal of this research project is to explore energy/emissions scenarios that aim to deliver improvements in human well-being not through the proxy of economic growth, but instead though calculation of the carbon emissions necessary for the provision of energy services that are linked to human development. A collaboration with Oxfam, this project combines its core campaigns around climate change and socio-economic equity into a unified framework for addressing environmental and social justice.

This presentation will examine a novel model combining an international Multi-Regional Environmentally-Extended Input-Output (MRIO) model with internationally available household expenditure data. This model will estimate carbon distributions ensuing directly and indirectly from household expenditures, thus providing evidence for inequality in emissions as well as economic purchasing power, disaggregated by expenditure categories.  These results will thus provide unique insights into how energy/emissions inequalities exist within today's societies.

The goal of my PhD research is to model further how equity and carbon mitigation measures may be in conflict (regressive) or coherence (progressive). However, for the purpose of this session, I am most interested in exploring the question of which sources of carbon emissions are most linked to high income/high expenditure households, as opposed to the necessities required by the lowest income brackets. If these sources of emissions can be identified as negotiable and/or excessive then this understanding may inform us about the specific ways our societies need to change so that needless energy use can be identified and curtailed, enabling development of the poorer majority within the constraints of climate change.

ABSTRACT. This paper explores the (un)making of meat and energy demand through the dynamic and co-evolving relationship between mealing practices and their linked material arrangements. In the first part of the paper I draw attention to the meat centric meal as a very high energy consumer and ask what constitutes its energy demand. As well as the heating technologies used for cooking, I home in on the now ubiquitous energy intensive cold technologies supplying its main ingredient. As a significant occupier within what is now a global network of ever expanding cold spaces, meat is intimately bound up with the development of the global cold chain. I briefly outline the history of its development, how the system of refrigerated transport and storage that we know today emerged from and developed in tandem with the inter-country and transnational meat trade. This particular technological achievement simultaneously transformed the geographies of meat while evening out seasonal constraints to its consumption, allowing the meat-centric meal to take hold in mealing practices in many more places and at many more times throughout the year.

In the second part of the paper, conceptualising the meat centric meal as an outcome of mealing practices, I draw on an analysis of two alternative ways in which diets are successfully steered away from meat. I pursue this through qualitative and ethnographic data generated with 21 meat-reducing households and 10 professionals attempting to intervene in diets to reduce meat consumption. By supposing that practices create needs (Warde 2005), rather than the desires or preferences of ‘meat eaters’, I show how meat-free initiatives and meat substitute products transform mealing practices in divergent ways. On the one hand, I find that as meanings of a normal meal change, the ‘need’ for meat is revised. And interestingly, in some cases, change ripples through to linked provisioning, storing and cooking practices such that the ‘need’ for energy demanding appliances is also opened up for negotiation. On the other hand, I find that as meanings of a normal meal are kept in place, energy demanding food storing practices are reproduced. Such continuities and changes are revealing of how practices and technologies are mutually constitutive in shaping meat and energy consumption. Most crucially, it is when discourses of asceticism and notions of entitlement to meat manifest in strategies to reduce its consumption that opportunities for identifying excessive energy demand are obscured.

ABSTRACT. Retirement increases leisure time and with the greater availability of time often comes for many people the possibility of travel of all kinds whether it is for its own sake, as in tourism, or in order to engage in other leisure activities or to spend time with friends. Various surveys seem to indicate that older cohorts are increasing their travel relative to other age groups, although the picture is somewhat fragmented. At the same time the baby boomer generation, much discussed as a generation characterised by unprecedented levels of consumption, are now retiring amid predictions that they will usher in a new era of hedonistic third agers who are anything but retiring.

In this paper we are interested in expectations of retirement and the place of leisure travel in this. Our discussion is based on a qualitative study of three cohorts of older people in the UK - one soon to retire, one recently retired, and one older cohort who have been retired for some time. The research was based around serial in depth interviews about leisure travel of different types through the life course and into retirement and older age. Here, we focus on the aspirations for and expectations of retirement as a particular phase of life, and the place of different kinds of travel within that. The notion of retirement as a time of personal fulfilment and reward is certainly present, but to what extent and with what implications for travel and resultant energy demand?

We are particularly interested in differences between the different age cohorts and in what this many tell us about change over time in how retirement is viewed and what kinds of activities people expect to fill it with. We are also cognisant of social class differences in cultures of post-retirement consumption and the expectation of resources to actualise this. We also discuss the extent to which senses of entitlement are actually fulfilled, as other features of later life such as bodily limitations and caring for others take on growing significance for many.