The emergence of digital platforms for energy provisioning enables new forms exchange of (green) energy for consumers. Based on interviews, observations and future-envisioning workshops in an Energy Living Lab, we show how platforms enable and complicate the notion of being an energy citizen.
Paper long abstract:
The recent emergence of digital platforms for energy provisioning enables new forms of access to and exchange of (green) energy for consumers. Such new ways of hooking up to the grid may problematise existing energy practices and facilitate new ones. In this paper we examine how platforms are becoming a means for people to engage with energy and the energy system, thus allowing new enactments of energy citizenship. We draw on interviews, observations and future-envisioning workshops in the context of a virtual power plant demonstration project in Amsterdam. In this project, a collective of local households with solar panels and home batteries pooled their resources for energy trading, local energy exchange and grid balancing. We map the way this energy platform constrains and enables the energy practices of its users, and discuss the notions of energy citizenship it thereby promotes and frustrates. We show how people’s existing practices of monitoring and timing energy use are disturbed by the new, automated layer of energy exchange. At the same time, the platform made people aware of new issues such as grid balance and energy equity, and thereby enabled and complicated the notion of being an energy citizen in a transformed energy system.