Abstract
As evidenced by the EU’s 2016 political ambition to empower energy consumers by allowing them to become prosumers, smart energy technologies are expected to contribute to energy savings as well as healthier and more comfortable lives. Norway is a vanguard country in implementing smart energy technologies, and a growing literature of social science and humanities research has investigated how such technology impacts everyday life. Taking stock with this literature and comparing two Norwegian high-tech demonstration cases, where local production and smarter consumption is enabled through novel technologies, the research objective of this paper was to analyse the ways in which smart energy technologies affect users, and the extent to which users can influence the role of smart energy technological arrangements in their everyday lives. Results indicated that there is a divergence between the intentions and the effects of the introduced technologies. For instance, smart technologies and prosuming affected the way people organised their everyday lives by demanding more work of participants. We conclude with recommendations for practitioners relating to consumer participation and energy prosuming, advising a focus on broader implications in addition to smart technological fixes.
Highlights
In 2016 the EU introduced a high-level policy ambition to provide ‘Clean Energy for All Europeans’ (Europa.eu, 2016)
Lennon et al (2019, p. 185) summarises findings by social sciences and humanities (SSH) made in efforts to tackle the question of user engagement by positing that ‘current energy systems are structured in a way that provides little agency to the majority of citizens’
In response to our research questions on how smart energy technology implementation affects end users’ everyday lives, what role people have in influencing smart energy technology arrangements, and how people can participate and be engaged, we make the following conclusions
Summary
In 2016 the EU introduced a high-level policy ambition to provide ‘Clean Energy for All Europeans’ (Europa.eu, 2016). 185) summarises findings by social sciences and humanities (SSH) made in efforts to tackle the question of user engagement by positing that ‘current energy systems are structured in a way that provides little agency to the majority of citizens’. As visions both for ‘passive’ and ‘active’ end users in the energy system of the future are plausible, this poses a question of how users will adapt to the one or the other, and what the significance of different strategies employed in implementation work, if any, might be for such outcomes.
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