Automated and absent: How people and households are accounted for in industry energy scenarios

Abstract

Industry builds energy scenarios to help plan and prepare for future uncertainties. Scenarios are a key mechanism for mobilising shared socio-technical imaginations to directly inform future-making and have very real implications for the energy system today. Whose visions and objectives are incorporated into them, and what assumptions they hold, are crucial to understanding the form that futures take. The components included in scenario building have been critiqued as too techno-centric for adequately reflecting social realities, especially when people are leading shifts towards a decentralised energy system. Social-scientific approaches to the study of energy emphasise that it must be understood as situated within the everyday practices of diverse people. Despite the key role of scenarios in shaping public expectations and preferences for possible futures, no analysis has explored how industry's energy scenarios account for the everyday lives of people as realising or contributing to future visions. Our qualitative content analysis of 14 industry reports that built scenarios found no data was used that accounted for how households imagined or desired living with energy and technology in the future. Our results demonstrate how engineering and economic frameworks informed stakeholder and scenario builders' understandings of people. The lack of diversity during the participatory process meant scenarios were derived from a common set of organisational values, knowledge, and assumptions about people and energy. The omission of social data relevant to people's lives meant their futures were illustrated in relation to their role as consumers, or customers, of energy rather than taking into account how the practices that use energy, such as heating and cooling, laundry, or showering, might affect futures. People and their everyday lives are critical to realising any energy scenario. Our findings lay the groundwork for a revisioning and repositioning of people, and evidence about them, in energy scenarios.