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- Convenors:
-
Charlotte Johnson
(University College London)
Abhigyan Singh (Delft University of Technology)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussants:
-
Simone Abram
(Durham University)
Nathalie Ortar (ENTPE-University of Lyon)
Margaret Matinga
Lurian Pires Klein (Virtual Power Solutions)
- Formats:
- Panels Network affiliated
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 21 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
Across Europe 'the grid edge', as instantiated in distributed, decentralised and off-grid energy systems, is emerging as a space for innovation and market experimentation. Our panel establishes it as a crucial site for anthropological inquiry and explores ways to both critique and intervene in it.
Long Abstract:
Across Europe the grid edge has become a site of innovation, experimentation and legal exception. Extra-regulatory markets such as peer-to-peer energy trading are being trialled. Algorithms and control systems are being piloted to automate household appliances. Communities are becoming virtual power plants. The emerging distributed, decentralised, and off-grid energy systems profoundly challenge the universalist logic of national energy infrastructures and create an urgent role for anthropological knowledge.
Anthropologists are entering these spaces to critique and to intervene. They question the assumptions supporting energy market construction and bring attention to non-market perspectives. They interrogate the inter- and intra-household dynamics that are created and destabilised as new flows of energy interact with existing gender, class and power relations. They examine the ethics, moralities, and values that are implicated and invoked. They are working in interdisciplinary ways, using interventionist approaches and are challenging the creation of binaries that pit automation against human control.
In this panel we discuss this as a new horizon for anthropological inquiry. One that is provoked by the changing ways energy is being negotiated within homes, circulated through neighbourhoods, and getting entangled in local markets. We invite papers that critique 'low carbon transition', provide ethnographic accounts of energy, or offer methodological innovations for collaborative, experimental or interdisciplinary working. We are particularly interested in insights from global south contexts and its cross-cultural comparison with the 'smart energy' narrative in the global north. Overall, we invite broad critical engagement with issues raised by doing anthropology at the grid edge.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 21 July, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how energy infrastructures are shaped by repair and maintenance. More specifically, we focus on HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) technologies to question how energy efficient buildings perform and are taken care of after installation.
Paper long abstract:
While energy transitions are often framed in terms of technoscientific innovation, this paper explores how energy systems are shaped by repair and maintenance. We focus on HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) technologies to question how energy efficient buildings perform after installation (Wade, Hitchings & Shipworth, 2016). This interest towards technicians, caretakers, facility managers and trainers involved in HVAC maintenance aims to provide novel insights on processes of energy optimization, incremental innovation and breakdown.
Based on ethnographic accounts and semi-structured interviews with technicians, entrepreneurs and experts from Switzerland, the paper first considers the mundane and affective relationships produced by maintenance and repair work, and their consequences on social ordering, daily comfort and mutual care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017; Harvey & Knox, 2013). We then put these workplace interactions into perspective with broader structural conditions (Murphy, 2015; Mattern, 2018) of the HVAC sector in Switzerland: the evolving regulatory framework (energy efficiency and CO2 reductions goals; safety, quality, and comfort standards), labor conditions (wage, labor shortage, immigration, gender, training, etc.) and market dynamics (liberalization of energy markets, joint-ventures, new market entrants, digitization, energy contracting).
The study suggests that HVAC maintenance and care go beyond the reproduction of a status quo around ageing infrastructures. Maintainers are seen as key drivers for innovation, precisely because their work mediates energy users, infrastructures and producers. Their roles as middlemen are also critical in the inclusion of users and their control over energy systems, especially in a context of market deregulation, technological complexification and digitization.
Paper short abstract:
The 'low carbon transition' generally fails to question how excessive lifestyle expectations may curtail energy efficiency. This paper compares householders living in some of the smallest and biggest homes in the Global North to compare norms that are enabling a rise in floor area per capita.
Paper long abstract:
The 'low carbon transition' and 'smart' solutions generally fail to delineate necessary energy uses or question how excessive lifestyle expectations may curtail attempts to achieve ambitious climate change targets. One example of this is that decreasing household sizes globally are resulting in rising space per person which significantly influences energy demand per capita, and is widely recognised to undermine energy savings from improved energy efficiency. Despite increasing contributions by sociologists, historians, and geographers to provide more complex and contextual accounts to inform intervention strategies (e.g. challenging the normalisation of thermal comfort as 21C, which local and cultural ways of coping with variation in indoor temperatures) changes in house and household sizes are missing from these debates. Indeed, rich investigation and offering complex and situated accounts of what happens within the privacy of the home is an area in which anthropology excels, and which presents an avenue for more daring and 'interventionist' anthropological contributions to energy and sustainability discourses. Adopting a quasi-ethnographic approach, involving virtual tours of the home through photos and video with 12 UK and 12 Australian households, this paper explores expectations of floor area per capita in two developed countries: one with some of the smallest (UK) and the other with some of the biggest (Australia) homes in order to critically reflect on cultural variation and understanding of 'normal' home life that are both deliberately and inadvertently enabling a rise in floor area per capita.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic research at utility-scale solar projects and household solar, we investigate how current engagements with energy production reinforce existing class, gender, and racial hierarchies, while using the logics of environmentalism to naturalize these inequalities
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, we explore how gender, class, and race inform collective versus individual engagements with renewable power. We do so by examining the divergent discourses concerning solar energy, in the context of installation of larger utility-scale installations versus at household level (rooftop solar) . Our ethnographic research, based in Virginia, USA, includes a successful community effort in Culpepper, Virginia to block the construction of multiple utility-scale solar projects. These proposed projects would have been built near or on land designated as Revolutionary and Civil War battlefields, and community members, seeking to protect a historical legacy, protested the installation. We examine the ethics involved in rejecting large-scale solar projects, exploring which historical narratives are preserved, and what histories and futures are ellided. Our project compares this community response to utility-scale solar with individual discourses concerning rooftop solar, a costly investment available only to the few. By comparing the political discourses that emerge around individual and utility-scale projects, we demonstrate how current engagements with energy production replicate and reinforce existing class, gender, and racial hierarchies, while simultaneously using the logics of the nation and environmentalism to naturalize these inequalities.
Paper short abstract:
This article presents the ethnography of renewable energies policies in Argentina, centered in the social impact that produced the construction of wind farms. The results could be used for a cross-cultural case of how global policies impacts in the local edge grid markets and territories.
Paper long abstract:
This article presents the results of an ethnography of renewable energies policies in Argentina, centered in the social impact that produce the construction of wind farms. For the last four years I have been working in the municipal government as Secretary of Development at Tornquist District, and have been in contact with the ongoing construction of 3 wind farms inside the District. The prospective farms are licenced to cover 300 MW for the year 2020 only in this District, and the whole region expects to see more than 1500 MW with the construction of 15 wind farms.
The objectives of this ethnography looks to produce knowledge to be utilized as tools in the field of anthropology, planning and energy. Decision-making groups such as officials, politicians, businessman, entrepreneurship, and academics could use these tools to change the way they manage territories, economy, energy resources, and organizations.
In order to achieve these objectives, I study the social imaginaries about future and energy in different decision-making groups, as a way to understand the manner they make their decisions and create agendas of development in the energy sector. Specifically, I use an ethnographic method to study temporality, spatiality and rhythms of life, which I call "cultural rhythmics".
This ethnography from the global south could be used for a cross-cultural comparison with the smart energy model, as a case of how global policies impacts in local edge grid markets and territories.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the relation between Big Tech/smart tech and grids of district heating in Denmark. It argues that the infrastructures emerging from this relation are established through various constellations of the centralisation-decentralisation dichotomy and redoings of forms of ownership.
Paper long abstract:
'The grid edge' as a technical infrastructure has lately emerged through, amongst other things, the innovation of digital technologies. Accordingly, it is time to analytically consider which kinds of grids are referred to and where this 'edge' geographically and materially is placed. Whilst the political attention to decentralising energy and data infrastructures is increasing, the access to and ownership of digital data seems to be going through a general centralisation, mainly led by Big Tech. New hyper-scale data centres are being built across Denmark by the largest tech corporations. An important driver for this process is the belief that waste heat from data centres can be used for distribution through local district heating facilities. Many different institutions seem onboard with this imaginary, yet in practice things are taking shape, as municipalities are taking the opportunity to attract tech corporations and smart tech to cities, towns and empty fields, all located outside the capital area, which is seen as an act of reclaiming agency in times of centralisation. The governance of district heating involves public institutions, communities and both large and small energy plants, but is the heating transformed, or redistributed in terms of ownership, if suddenly produced by the storage and processing engines of Big Tech and not just the local energy plant? My paper suggests that in addition to 'edge' being a term for describing a technical infrastructure, the edge marks a place of transformation, a place of difference to the centre.
Paper short abstract:
Two examples of collective self consumption in the UK provide material for critical reflection on the value produced through decentralized infrastructure, including the value of anthropological knowledge in supporting the operationalization of social embedded energy markets.
Paper long abstract:
CSC offers a route to a more decentralized, flexible and low carbon electricity grid by increasing the consumption of renewable electricity generated locally. If a group of residents can use electricity from a neighbourhood Solar PV array they could reduce network peaks, ease local capacity issues and enable a greener and lower cost electricity system. Such potential motivates the UK government and electricity network operators to facilitate 'collective self-consumption' via market innovation. The offer to build such networks is taken up by community energy groups, who hope to create a new source of revenue, increase their access to sites for renewable generation assets, extend their reach through the community and allow them to design an energy market on their own terms. Anthropological theories of exchange, however, asks us to consider the morality (Bloch and Parry, 1989) and mutuality (Singh et. al, 2017) of these new forms of markets. What are the social effects when these trading platforms turn neighbours into 'donors and receivers' and redraw collectives according to the lines of the electricity cabling?
In this paper I present two empirical examples; a feasibility study of a private micro grid, and a technology pilot of P2P trading. I discuss how the different parties understand the value they aim to create and consider the ways that participants embrace, alter or reject these forms of value. I also critically reflect on the deployment of anthropological knowledge in designing these systems and remaking energy markets.
Paper short abstract:
This paper presents a case study from Sweden, focusing on the planning of developing a new sustainable city district in Malmö. We will examine the dialogues including various stakeholders relating to the energy systems in the area, especially the discussions on establishing a microgrid.
Paper long abstract:
New decentralized energy generation technologies (PV, wind,) have turned scale economies up-side down and have made smaller generation units more economically viable. The increased penetration of information technologies has led to new possibilities of managing infrastructures in a less hierarchical and more flexible way. This together with citizen demand for energy control have brought energy communities to the agenda around Europe. This can add up to a substantial transformation, or transition, towards more sustainable systems, but their longer-term outcomes still have to be seen.
This paper will present case study from Sweden, where participatory observations and interviews have been conducted in the planning of developing a new sustainable city district in Malmö. The process has included a variety of stakeholders and voices and we will examine the dialogues relating to the energy systems in the area and especially the discussions on establishing a microgrid. The electricity grid company in the area promote, with support from the city administration, their solutions, while the property developers opt for more decentralised community owned systems. Although the discussions have been technologically oriented, the outcome of the discussions have to an equal extent, if not more, been people, their perceptions, and their interactions with each other, with the professional society and regulations. How to understand these dialogues in a sustainable energy system perspective will be discussed.
Paper short abstract:
Based on an ethnographic 'intervention' study conducted at two off-grid villages in rural India, the paper presents a local model for p2p energy exchanges consisting of five distinct levels: ghar ('home'), makan ('house'), tola ('neighbourhood'), gaon ('village'), and bazaar ('market').
Paper long abstract:
The ongoing development of off-grid and decentralized renewable energy systems across the globe are enabling arenas for peer-to-peer (p2p) energy exchanges for emerging within villages and neighbourhoods. The existing energy literature on p2p energy exchanges is predominantly based on techno-economic notions built upon visions of rational choice approaches that assume p2p energy exchanges to be solitarily structured by the logic of market and values of efficiency, optimization, and maximization.
This paper critiques this dominant view of p2p energy exchanges and reports from an ethnographic 'intervention' study conducted at two off-grid villages in rural India for 11 months. This cross-disciplinary methodological approach draws upon the discourses of design anthropology, research through design, and ethnography. Moreover, the study utilizes theoretical perspectives from economic anthropology to understand the p2p energy exchanges that emerged with the 'intervention'.
Based on the analysis of the ethnographic data, the paper presents a local model for p2p energy exchanges consisting of five distinct levels: ghar ('home'), makan ('house'), tola ('neighbourhood'), gaon ('village'), and bazaar ('market'). The paper discusses how these levels of p2p energy exchanges, representing conceptual, social and material spaces, form a base for the emergence of distinct forms of energy exchanges and are shaped by diverse logics and values.