Abstract
Within the areas of distributed, off-grid, and decentralized energy, there is a growing interest in local energy exchanges. A crucial component of an energy exchange is a return provided by an energy-receiver to an energy-giver for the energy provided. The existing energy literature on such returns is primarily limited to monetary returns and lacks a critical discussion on the different types of monetary and non-monetary returns possible and variation in people’ preferences for these. Based on an ethnographic ‘research intervention’ study conducted at two off-grid villages in rural India for 11 months, this article presents a sociocultural understanding of returns. The article presents a classification of returns consisting of three types, i.e., in-cash, in-kind and intangible, and proposes a conceptual model of ‘returns-continuum.’ The article showcases how people’s preference for a type of return varies with the nature of their social relationships with each other and suggests that configuring a return is not merely an economic act but a complex sociocultural process. Finally, the article recommends to energy researchers and practitioners to enable diversity in returns, to acknowledge dynamics of social relations in returns, to interconnect energy economy with the local in-kind economy, and to engage with ethnographic approaches.
Highlights
The theme of local or inter-household energy exchanges is increasingly gaining attention in the academic as well as in the business world
The article recommends to energy researchers and practitioners to enable diversity in returns, to acknowledge dynamics of social relations in returns, to interconnect energy economy with the local in-kind economy, and to engage with ethnographic approaches
Within the realm of distributed, off-grid and decentralized energy, the topic of energy exchange appears under the guise of various labels, such as peer-to-peer energy [1,2,3], transactive energy [4,5,6], energy trading [7,8,9], energy sharing [10,11,12], and mutual energy exchange [13]
Summary
The theme of local or inter-household energy exchanges is increasingly gaining attention in the academic as well as in the business world. Often external agencies (NGOs, utilities, governments) initiate an energy exchange pilot in an off-grid setting by creating a local energy market, where a return structure is constructed based on a socioeconomic evaluation of a local community gauged by willingness-to-pay metric and the local community is engaged in the payment collection (see [17,28]). The householders had complete control of the energy infrastructure installed and freedom to structure returns, as they desired without any involvement of the ethnographer This setup facilitated the ethnographic inquiry to address the following broad research questions: What types of returns givers and receivers invoke when they are given control of an off-grid energy distribution?
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