Abstract
Households are increasingly the centre of attention in smart grid experiments, where they are dominantly framed in a role as ‘flexible consumers’ of electricity. This paper reports from the Danish smart grid demonstration project eFlex, which aimed to investigate the ‘flexibility potential’ of households, and it shows how householders are far from just ‘consumers’ in the system. Drawing on empirical material from ethnographic fieldwork in 49 households that tested smart grid equipment, the paper firstly demonstrates how eFlex users were also creative innovators. Secondly, by integrating user innovation literature, domestication theory and practice theory, the paper illustrates how the eFlex equipment interacted with a variety of collectively shared everyday practices in the household and argues that this unique family context accordingly had implications for the ‘innovative capacity’ of these pioneer users. The paper thus calls for smart grid stakeholders to begin taking the ‘innovator role’ of smart home users seriously, but equally calls for a more contextual and situated perspective when involving innovative users – their families have an equal part to play in the development of the smart grid.
Highlights
There is no end to the possibilities and benefits embedded in the vision of the smart grid
Domestication and de-configurations As we can observe in the family stories, the use of the eFlex equipment and the meanings ascribed to it are quite different between the two families
The equipment became domesticated into a family setting with its own unique moral economy, which was under constant negotiation, and which had an influence on what the equipment was used for and what practices it co-developed with
Summary
There is no end to the possibilities and benefits embedded in the vision of the smart grid. Most smart grid projects to date have focused on developing technologies, but increasingly the ‘consumer side’ has been the centre of attention (Verbong et al, 2013), where the challenge is to unravel how end-users can be motivated to take on the role as flexible consumers. The bulk of these projects have a rather individualistic and techno-economic approach and often test traditional consumer incentives through quantitative methods by, for example, surveying the response to price signals or detailed information on energy consumption (Gangale et al, 2013).
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