The cafĂ© is quiet this morning. Just a few customers taking their time: a couple with suitcases stopping off on their way to the railway station and a guy settling in with his pastry and laptop. I like working here when itâs this emptyâmy thoughts wander in interesting ways. Itâs a good place for trying out new ideas. Whenever I can, I get here early to make sure I can get a table and plug in whatever needs charging. And sit away from the heaters and the speakersâsome of the musicâs ok, but not all of it. Most mornings, I reckon there are more staff here than customers. New ones keep appearingâfetching boxes from the store room, looking at clipboards, bringing toppings to make up sandwiches for later in the day. Canât work out how their shifts are arranged. There are a few more customers coming in now, coffees to be made, money exchanged. I wonder if anyone will have time to change that burned out light bulb.
Accounts of energy demand can start from many places. Physicists might begin with the first law of thermodynamics, the rule that energy cannot be created or destroyed. Economists might start from models that forecast future trends in relation to economic growth. Utility company workers might privilege the meters whose readings slowly measure accumulating flows of gas or electricity. Bus company managers might emphasise the route changes that become necessary as diesel vehicles are retired to make way for electric ones. Policymakers might foreground the emissions targets and international agreements on climate change that (perhaps) make managing energy demand a priority.
In this book, we start from somewhere else, from an interest in what energy is for (Shove and Walker 2014; Walker 2014). Our core question is a provocatively expansive one and up to this point remarkably understudied: what social processes constitute and make energy demand? Just as the starting points above establish different concerns and lead to different lines of investigation, so too our starting point is decisive in setting up the questions and lines of analysis that follow. By asking about the social processes that constitute energy demand, we mark out a concern for how energy demand is embedded in the shared practices and activities that make up the ongoing flow of societyâsuch as working, commuting, eating, going to music festivals, staying in hotels, cleaning houses, visiting hospitals, walking dogs, travelling in retirement and running cafes, among many other diverse and varied things. In order to understand energy demandâits making, patterning, variation and dynamicsâwe argue that it is necessary to understand the practices and processes that underpin and ultimately give rise to the consumption of energy from different sources (electricity, gas, solid fuels) and the use of various energy services (transportation, heat, Wi-Fi).
We do not therefore focus on energy demand as a âthingâ with particular measurable effects, for example on supply infrastructures, or from which projections of future trends or conclusions about strategies for change might be directly drawn. Indeed, in many of the discussions in this book energy itself fades into the background as we step back from the metrics (Kw/h, ktoe: kilotonnes of oil equivalent) and energy efficiency ratings that are common foci in other accounts. Instead we foreground the diverse and varied processes of demanding energy that are woven into daily life (e.g. Rinkinen 2015) and contemplate how these processes have been changing over time and will continue to do so. This collection represents the first sustained effort to pose questions in these terms, develop analytic strategies and provide empirical insights that start from a concern for understanding what energy is for.
Stepping back from energy demand per se, in order to ultimately better understand it, involves focusing upon complex social relationships. There is no simple answer, for example, to the question of what or who it is that demands energy. At times it might make sense to privilege groups of people when providing explanations, or at other times technologies, and both have been studied extensively in other energy research (e.g. Isaac and van Vuuren 2009; Sahakian 2011; OâDoherty et al. 2008; Burholt and Windle 2006). Yet our starting point also makes it possible to consider how particular working practices , lifestyles, infrastructures or stages in life might be the units most consequential for processes of demanding energy.
The authors in this collection devote close attention to this range of units of analysis in order to better understand how demanding energy is a part of the practices of everyday life. For some, this involves close empirical investigations of what people are doing and how this is socially understood, an orientation informed by well-established precedents within qualitative, ethnographic and hermeneutic research. Instead of just taking for granted categories that summarise social activityâsuch as âcookingâ, âworkingâ or âhome computingââauthors delve into the diversity and variation within and between such categories, engaging in detail with temporally and spatially situated enactments. Looking carefully at what people are doing and how energy becomes embroiled in these activities facilitates the challenging of assumptions about the relationship between social dynamics and energy, relationships that have been âblack boxedâ or totally overlooked in previous research and policy. In addition, investigating a range of actors, materials and practices situated at particular moments, or evolving as part of historically specific transformations , allows discussion of what lies behind and before many of the summary tables, metrics , trends and load curves that are common touchstones within discussions of energy. As a result, stepping back from energy per se is shown to provide a fuller understanding of what contributes to demanding energy, and where, therefore, opportunities for change may arise. Whilst familiar energy technologies and infrastructures are ever present in these accounts, stepping back from energy per se means that they are not separated or isolated from the social worlds that they are resolutely embedded within.
In addition to this general interest in data that evidences what energy is for, and not only how much of it is used or via which technologies , some authors engage directly with theories of social practice. This body of literature provides varied accounts of how the social world is constituted by peopleâs on-going practices, which create, sustain, transform and are influenced by diverse social structures (Giddens 1979, 1984; Schatzki 1996, 2002; Shove et al. 2012). In summarising this literature, Reckwitz emphasises how it provides a different means of approaching the role of the body, mind and knowledge in social processes (2002). Whereas economic analyses focus on single actions and choices, and other cultural theories focus on either the knowledge and meanings of the mind, the signs and symbols of texts, or the dynamics of intersubjective speech acts, practice theories focus instead upon âblocksâ of activity: âpattern[s] which can be filled out by a multitude of single and often unique actions â (Reckwitz 2002: 250). These patterned blocks are practices, a unit of study and analysis that is socially constituted, and which is shaped not only by peopleâs actions and statements but also by socially appropriate materials, understandings, goals and procedures. It is therefore not individual dynamics that are of primary concern, but how socially shared and patterned practices are reproduced and changed. Indeed the social world can be understood as a nexus of practices (Hui et al. 2017) with particular material relations (Shove 2017; Morley 2017), power relations (Watson 2017), interconnections (Blue and Spurling 2017) and variations (Hui 2017) of relevance for thinking about energy demand .
For some authors in this volume, this theoretical orientation informed their research design, leading them to ask research questions that seek to uncover how an attention to practices, rather than, for example, the individual attitudes, behaviours and choices dominating many existing discussions of energy and sustainability (Shove 2010), can explain previously ignored or misunderstood dynamics of energy and transport demand. Others go much further, engaging in detail with specific concepts from practice theories in order to develop new empirical analyses and theoretical resources. In these cases, authors show that developing better understandings of energy demand is not about creating new categories or representations of energy demand itself, but rather about finding ways of describing and summarising social dynamics that then have important implications for how demanding energy is constituted, patterned and changing. Therefore, at the same time as they provide case-specific insights, the chapters also serve as exemplars that demonstrate and develop the scope for more sophisticated and theoretically engaged understandings of what energy is for.
By privileging processes of demanding energy, and the practices involved, this collection also challenges established boundaries within discussions of energy demand. Across the existing literature, transport-derived energy demand has largely been discussed independently from building-related (domestic and non-domestic) use and demandâas even a cursory examination of journal and book titles reveals (e.g. Inderwildi and King 2012; Williams 2012). Yet this boundary appears increasingly to be an artefact of sectoral and disciplinary boundaries, rather than an empirically sensible analytic strategy. Transformations such as flexible or teleworking, online shopping and an increase in social media apps and platforms are undoubtedly affe...