Abstract
Many energy researchers and practitioners envision householders to have an active role in local energy distribution in emerging energy systems. In the energy literature, the dominant view of local energy distribution, grounded in the rational choice perspective, sees exchanges of energy between households as energy trading. The existing energy literature lacks conceptualization of social and personal exchange of energy between households that is mutually structured and negotiated. This article builds on the theoretical works of an economic anthropologist, Stephen Gudeman, to conceptually discuss such energy exchanges. This article reports from an ‘ethnographic intervention’ study conducted at an off-grid village in rural India for three months (1 February–30 April 2016). The ethnographic data analysis reveals how social relations and diverse cultural values influence on energy exchanges between households in the village. The article introduces ‘circle of mutual energy exchange’ as a conceptual, analytical and descriptive unit for understanding such energy exchanges. The article describes two co-existing and dialectically connected modes of energy exchanges: ‘mutual energy sharing’ and ‘mutual energy trading.’
Highlights
Across the globe, with the increasing adoption of renewable energy technologies, many energy researchers and practitioners envision electrical energy provisioning systems go through a systemic shift towards distributed, decentralized or off-grid energy systems [1,2,3,4,5]
This rational perspective universally locates the value of energy exchange in ideas of efficiency and optimization of resources, and maximization of financial benefits by balancing of energy surplus and deficit. This rational choice lens heavily dominates the concept of energy exchange and limits its meaning to energy trading. This article describes this dominant notion of an energy trading or a market energy exchange (MaEE) as an impersonal, anonymous, and competitive buying and selling transaction of energy between an energy-giver and energy-receiver where price is determined by selfregulating neoclassical market principles
As per Indian Government’s Rural Electrification Corporation's (REC) data9 of February 2017, in Gaya district, there are only 35.01% of rural households that are electrified with 1707 villages that electrified less than 50%
Summary
With the increasing adoption of renewable energy technologies, many energy researchers and practitioners envision electrical energy provisioning systems go through a systemic shift towards distributed, decentralized or off-grid energy systems [1,2,3,4,5]. This rational choice lens heavily dominates the concept of energy exchange and limits its meaning to energy trading This article describes this dominant notion of an energy trading or a market energy exchange (MaEE) as an impersonal, anonymous, and competitive buying and selling transaction of energy between an energy-giver and energy-receiver where price is determined by selfregulating neoclassical market principles. All these issues are vital; there is another dimension of exchange (of energy) that requires research attention, i.e. how such energy exchanges with the local community are socially and culturally embedded This study started with an installation of a small-scale and off-grid energy distribution infrastructure to enable exchanges of solar-lighting in a village in India.
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