Who cares? How care practices uphold the decentralised energy order

Abstract

This paper represents the decentralised energy order as a matter of care: so as to make visible the unequal burden of care and to encourage active caring. It extends an emerging overlap that exists in studies of repair and maintenance of material objects from science and technology studies (STS) and an increasing interest in the creation and maintenance of relationships of care in energy systems. Inspiration is drawn from feminist STS work that calls attention to the continuous labour of repair and maintenance necessary to enact and sustain a socio-technical order. Fieldwork involved virtual interviews and small focus groups with 55 Australian householders who purchased decentralised energy technologies (solar, batteries and electric vehicles) and 18 intermediaries from industry and civil society. The analysis exposes how invisible care practices not only underpin householders’ material engagement with the energy system, but also how they are inextricably entangled with making a decentralised energy ‘order’ work in practice. Relying on ‘good hearted’ intermediaries is unlikely to be a workable basis for a functioning and fair energy system. An alternative approach is called for: an exploration of what a caring decentralised energy system might look like. <em><strong>Policy relevance</strong></em> Care is significant for making energy systems work, and care has a role in building new energy orders and liveable futures. This research reveals that decentralised energy is enabled and made workable by the care people have for the future and their ability to take responsibility and action. It highlights those excluded from care-giving and -receiving, gaps that hamper the flow of care, and ways in which existing gender relations are reinforced by and reinforce these gaps and exclusions. Policymakers can recognise the importance, but also the limitations, of bureaucratic and market care in the energy system, and the need for policies and projects to recognise, support, and empower diverse abilities and care practices. This could be achieved through meaningful co-creation of policies, rules and processes. Energy businesses and intermediaries are encouraged to go beyond a transactional approach to installing technologies.