Making sense of renewable energy: Practical knowledge, sensory feedback and household understandings in a Scottish island microgrid

Abstract

Technology-mediated energy feedback is a common demand management intervention aiming to encourage shedding and shifting practices, whereby householders potentially alter their energy consumption in response to factors including fluctuating electricity prices, and changing weather conditions. Due to issues of intermittent generation and mismatched supply and demand, shifting and shedding practices are particularly important in renewable-based grids. Yet energy feedback is based on an information-deficit model of householders which, among other issues, privileges certain forms of information and knowledge over others––namely the institutionalised and the quantifiable over the practical and the sensory. Drawing on social practice theory, this paper presents qualitative research from the Isle of Eigg, Scotland, which is the site of a microgrid deriving roughly 90 percent of its electricity from renewable sources. This empirical material is used to explore the mundane, tacit and corporeal forms of practical knowledge householders draw on to understand energy consumption and generation, and in particular the role of sensory feedback––what people can see, hear, touch, or otherwise sense. The analysis finds that islanders draw on heat- and weather-based forms of sensory feedback that help them to understand domestic energy consumption, and renewable generation, respectively. Meanwhile, energy monitors find limited utility, with conventional energy feedback used largely to formalise and supplement practical forms of knowledge developed through islanders’ bodily engagement with the environment, and lived experience. The research suggests that heat- and weather-based forms of sensory feedback are of potential relevance to the challenge of intermittency faced by renewable grids.