Energy platforms and the future of energy citizenship

Abstract

Energy platforms involve citizens in the energy system by creating and orchestrating virtual energy collectives that can support energy system governance. In such an energy collective, households pool their resources to engage in energy trading, collective self-consumption, or grid balancing. In this paper we draw on the theory of material participation to examine how everyday interactions with energy platform technologies enable people to enact energy citizenship. Our findings from interviews and workshops in a demonstration project of an energy platform show that energy platforms complicate the notion of being an energy citizen. For the householders in our research, engaging in new collective energy practices disturbed the existing link between domestic energy practices and energy citizenship. Where people's energy citizenship used to be centred around their own domestic domain, engagement with platform technologies required them to reflect on their position in relation to new issues such as the ‘greenness’ of various energy markets. Moreover, people were confused about the relation between their own agency and goals as an energy citizen, vis-a-vis the collective agency that results from the bundling of energy practices, and the power and motivations of platform providers and energy system actors. Uncertainties around agency and responsibility need to be reduced if platform-based energy collectives are to play a role in fostering meaningful citizen participation in the energy transition. For platform providers, this implies acknowledging people's existing practices and trajectories of energy citizenship, and providing feedback about the contributions people are making.