Week 3 Lecture I

Question 1

‘grand narrative’ vs reality

Answer 1

Energy transitions involve long-term structural change and are generally presented and discussed in ‘grand narrative’ terms: low carbon, sustainable growth, smart systems.

Yet demand for energy services has always been highly distributed and local considerations are also becoming more prominent on the supply side, with developments in distributed electricity generation and heat networks.

Question 2

Many older residents had experienced a transition

Answer 2

from belonging to fuel-producing communities and handling solid fuels to becoming ‘consumers’ in uneasy and uncomprehending relationships with distant suppliers of gas and electricity.

Their stories add texture to ‘grand narratives’ of energy transition, demonstrating, for a particular place and time, some of the complexity and path dependencies of energy systems and how they play out in social and distributional terms.

Question 3

actors involved in the transition

Answer 3

They show how local resources, institutions, social networks and built environment can affect energy services and responses to them, highlighting the role of ‘middle actors’ in an energy advice service as guides to transition.

The title of this paper promised a tale concerning coal (geography, culture, local economy, resilience, community); steel houses (building materials and techniques); and the man in the moon (remoteness/ immediacy, communication, technologies).

Question 4

main lesson to emerge from these West Lothian stories

Answer 4

even when energy supply is largely in the hands of large corporate businesses and regulated nationally, demand remains stubbornly localised, influenced by the state of housing, employment, income and the transfer of knowledge and skill between individuals and organisations.

Question 5

Gas and electricity may be the same in any place

Answer 5

but they are not bought, used and understood in the same way in any place: housing, climate, demographics and social networks, all place-specific, are important in influencing how energy is captured and used.

Question 6

This paper starts from two premises:

Answer 6

that energy transition operates at many levels or scales and can be understood at many levels; and that transition is not a uniform process but one influenced by both geography and history

Question 7

personal stories

Answer 7

It offers extracts from residents and energy advisers’ accounts of energy transition in a particular locality and uses them to illustrate the value of personal and communal stories for energy research and policy.

In particular, the stories illustrate ways in which geography, history and politics have shaped the built environment and patterns of energy supply and demand, the impacts of change on relatively vulnerable citizens, and the role of energy advisers in helping them to cope

Question 8

The paper demonstrates how

Answer 8

individual and localised stories can contribute to analysis of topics such as utility-customer relations and social adaptation to changing circumstances; and it supports the argument for attending to the role of ‘middle actors’ in energy transition [3], not least because of the interpretive skills of these actors and their ability to communicate between actors and channel resources.

Question 9

To reduce fuel poverty:

Answer 9

improve access to information and advice and in particular raise
awareness of energy related matters
• increase household disposable income through either maximising income, ensuring
• maximum benefits take-up, or minimising expenditure by reducing fuel bills
• improve comfort levels in homes and therefore the health of the residents
• encourage landlords to adopt an effective policy on energy efficiency and fuel poverty
• promote the re-utilisation and conservation of resources’.

Question 10

significance of the local authority employees as middle-actors

Answer 10

contributing knowledge and skills that would traditionally have been either unnecessary or provided by family and friends.

Question 11

Four aspects of a home are distinguished:

Answer 11

a place for security and control,

for activity,

for relationships and continuity, and

for identity and values.

This can be valuable when evaluating how smart home technologies work in real homes, as well as in the more technical and prospective approaches to developing new socio-technical configurations

Question 12

why people don’t want smart homes

Answer 12

Explanations for the reluctant homeowners are diverse but include questions of reliability, cost, control, privacy and security

Question 13

crucial to smart home solutions is the

Answer 13

The active participation of citizens is considered crucial to this strategy and it is made clear that citizen participation and engagement form part of smart solutions in the home, although the documents tend to be vague about the form that this engagement should take

Question 14

First is home as security and control.

Answer 14

In opposition to workplace, institutions and cities or wild nature, home is the place where you are in control and can feel safe, even though, or maybe precisely because, the home might be surrounded by a hostile society. The home in this understanding is thus also associated with a safe haven and a refuge from the surroundings. Després talks about security and control as one aspect of home and a refuge from the outside world as another aspect, whereas in our terminology we combine them into one as we see them as two sides of the same experience.

From a sociological perspective [3] it can, however, be objected that home is not always a secure place, for instance for abused women and children, and that, for example, many teenagers might not feel that home is where they are in control of their own lives. The importance of home as control and safety can maybe best be understood, paradoxically, when studying those who have to live in places which do not accommodate this notion of the home, such as marginalised people living in rooming houses

Question 15

Second is the home as a site of activity,

Answer 15

either in the form of the many different activities of cooking, cleaning, eating and sleeping which constitute everyday life, or

in the form of actually working on and with the home, physically transforming the home to make it the place that best accommodates our activities and ideas. In the categories from Després [7], she mentions three different meanings of the home including the home as something to act upon and modify, the home as a centre of activity and the home as a material physical structure, whereas we in our approach combine these three into one aspect of the home as a physical place for activities.

Question 16

Third, the home is a place for relationships and continuity.

Answer 16

home is a temporal process, changing over time but also relating back to what was before.

family in the way houses have been handed from one generation to another [6], but also to our childhood memories of our birth home and generally to a sense of belonging and having roots

relationship with families and friends, with a strong connotation of home as a place to strengthen relationships with people one cares for

Question 17

The fourth, home as identity and values.

Answer 17

home as a reflection of one’s ideas and values, home as an indicator of social status, and home being a property to own

Bourdieu, expressing how we reflect our lifestyle to ourselves and show it to others through our possessions, unconsciously guided by our habitus

Higher social classes distinguish themselves from lower through their cultural and economic capital and new ideas of highbrow consumption continuously engender new questions of what an ‘ideal home’ should look like.

The decoration of our homes not only signals to others who we are but also works as a reflection of and dialogue with ourselves of what is important and right to us. What people do to their homes, in the form of retrofitting, decorating and furnishing them, might thus reflect different understandings of consumer cultures [29].

Housing researchers argue that the home is increasingly becoming an expression of the residents and their values and lifestyles [31] and that the house with its interior decorations and other equipment can be seen as a microcosm reflecting the residents’ social values and identities

Question 18

different social groups relate differently

Answer 18

to meanings of home, and how these different meanings of home relate to socio-economic differences and societal power relations.

maybe your neighbourhood or nation

Question 19

Concepts of a smart home:

Answer 19

Digital sensing

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and with connected appliances that can be

Remotely monitored and controlled

Responding to householder needs

Learning about the household

smart homes and other buildings are seen as flexibly-connected and interacting elements of energy systems

Question 20

At the individual household level, ‘smarting’ may integrate

Answer 20

electrical devices and services (for example, heating, lighting, security, photovoltaic generation, electric vehicle charging) for remote control by the occupants or some other agent [37]; moving beyond this, sensors and processors can also ‘acquire and apply knowledge’ about a home, acting independently of direct human agency to change control settings

Question 21

One rationale for smart homes is that they can promote

Answer 21

system efficiency by helping to reduce peak demand and to match demand with supply in real time.

A smart building is highly energy efficient and covers its very low energy demand to a large extent by on-site or district-system-driven renewable energy sources.

Question 22

A smart building

Answer 22

(i) stabilises and drives a faster decarbonisation of the energy system through energy storage and demand-side flexibility;
(ii) empowers its users and occupants with control over the energy flows;
(iii) recognises and reacts to users’ and occupants’ needs in terms of comfort, health, indoor air quality, safety as well as operational requirements

Question 23

But a home is, by definition, occupied by humans and the way in which it is occupied has a major and well-documented effect on energy outcomes

Answer 23

We can therefore expect the distribution of smartness/intelligence and agency between technology and humans to be an important influence on consumption, responsiveness to system conditions and occupant satisfaction.

If a smart home system is seen as primarily for convenience and comfort, then this undermines assumptions of resource efficiency and demand reduction within a home

But for the purposes of this paper, a high level of device connectedness within and beyond the home, along with reliance on that connectivity for everyday operations, are seen as crucial when defining whether a home may be called ‘smart’.

the term ‘smart’ is associated with emotive and affective meanings such as cleverness and neatness and also with negative connotations such as loss of privacy, loss of control and risks to health

Question 24

Smart homes, security and control

Answer 24

There are also interests in developing in-home health monitoring and technology for assisted living for people with chronic illness or disability.

But to adopt smart technology is to open up data flows within the home and between it and the outside world, and privacy concerns have been a factor limiting enthusiasm for smart home technology

likely to influence where they wish to draw the boundaries of ‘home’ as a secure place.

For example, while load-shifting may help to keep a neighbourhood electricity network stable, there may be safety concerns about operating appliances while the householder is absent

Question 25

who has control?

Answer 25

Yet new technology can redistribute control within households, towards the person who best understands new controls or who most wants to operate household equipment

However, the same studies also report that most often there will be other people in the households who can feel that they are losing control, and there is often a strong gender aspect to this.

Essentially, smart connections can redraw home boundaries if they allow for direct load control of some functions by the supplier or a third party. Whether the occupants feel more or less secure as a consequence may have a lot to do with how they feel about the people, systems or organisations they share information with [60] and their perceptions of what constitutes a threat to security.

Question 26

Smart homes as places for activity

Answer 26

As noted above, smart technology developers may assume that automated systems can learn our routines and adapt to them. Whether this works well for householders will depend in part on how well the technology can distinguish between routines and one-off adjustments for particular situations such as sickness in the family or accommodating guests

They can also substitute for traditional activities, for example temperature regulation, keeping an eye on family members, and some of the routine checking and tweaking of household equipment.

However, different types of DIY-smart home components could make it possible in future to introduce smart home technologies without making big changes in buildings

The growth in wireless connections enables this step by step integration as well, though problems with different systems not communicating well with each other may still support an argument for making homes smart as part of deep building renovations.

Question 27

Smart homes and places for relationships and continuity

Answer 27

An acceptable smart home in terms of continuity may be a home that offers flexibility as well as reliability to new residents: one where they are not ‘locked in’ to practices that they dislike or do not understand.

In some homes these iterations might, however, not take place because of lack of knowledge or lack of interest from the household members

Some occupants might find themselves accepting installations which are not working optimally according to their actual wishes and needs, or rejecting them, because they are either not interested in, or capable of, undertaking this kind of iteration themselves, and having someone coming on a daily basis to help with modification seems quite unrealistic

A young woman explains, for instance, how she feels happy when she arrives home late in the evening and the light turns on automatically. She expresses it as a feeling that she is welcomed home, even though it is automatic, because she knows that her father programmed the light to do this

Question 28

community level, (relationships and continuity)

Answer 28

managing and communicating social relations as well as energy issues. At an EU level, energy demand side management (DSM) projects increasingly take a community-oriented approach, including forms of social comparison and competitions, community rewards, social marketing and establishing trusted actors [67].

A future approach for smart home technologies might thus follow a line of helping communities as well as individuals in managing storage, production and consumption of energy, as well as communicating with each other about energy and other interests.

Question 29

Smart homes and reflection of identity and social status

Answer 29

With all new technologies which are brought into everyday life there are first movers who are interested in the sense of newness and social status that can be part of having new technologies, and this may be seen as a general driver of still more consumption

People who want to express through their home that they are modern, also think smart home technologies are a part of this:

though the opposite is also very possible, that people prefer not to have smart technologies because they may not match their home and themselves aesthetically.

Studies of DIY smart home owners generally report them as having a background within programming, so part of the motivation can be seen as a hobby, where ideas of programming are tried out in their own home [61,62,65], and this hobby can thus also be seen as a way of reflecting one’s own identity in the home.

how people can use smart technologies to personalise and make their home more homey

Question 30

Energy consumption in EU households

Answer 30

64. 1% space heating
65. 8% water heating
66. 4% light and appliances
67. 6% cooking
68. 3% space cooling
69. 9% others

Question 31

smart home definition

Answer 31

“A smart home is one in which a communications network links sensors, appliances, controls and other devices to allow for remote monitoring and control by occupants and others in order to provide frequent and regular services to occupants and to the electricity system.”

Question 32

Digital sensing

Answer 32

Sensing movement, electrical devices and services

Question 33

Information and Communication Technology

ICT

Answer 33

Sending signals, identifying devices, issuing a
comand and executing a response.
Constant flow of information
Data storage

Question 34

Remote control

Answer 34

Operating with apps, voice commands, internet,
automation, AI.
Do not have to be home to control what is
happening

Question 35

Personalized technologies

Answer 35

Recognizing and reacting to the users needs.
Acquiring and applying knowledge about the
home.
Potential benefits to people with disabilities,
elderly people and children.

Question 36

Why do we need smart homes?

Answer 36

T O  S A V E  E N E R G Y
T O  S A V E  M O N E Y
T O  S I M P L I F Y  L I F E
T O  I N C R E A S E  S E C U R I T Y
T O  D O  H O U S E H O L D  T A S K S
F O R  E N T E R T A I N M E N T

Question 37

Biggest challenges

Answer 37

Privacy, and security issues
Reluctancy from consumers
Bugs
Setting up or incorporating new systems on a global level
Focusing on economic growth rather than sustainability
Targeting affluent population groups
Failing to challenge consumerist cultures
Assuming the rational choice model for individual decision-making
Rebound effect