Week 3 Lecture II Flashcards
Sufficiency definition
related to boundaries on energy services in order to keep global consumption within acceptable environmental limits while allowing for increasing demand in non-OECD countries: there was an onus on the affluent nations to bring about deep reductions in energy use
sufficiency not only limits damage but supports human and ecological wellbeing.
Efficiency: (-)
So it is possible for a building, vehicle or system to be highly energy-efficient while at the same time being highly energy-consuming.
SDGS about energy:
7 Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all.
energy (though without specific reference to services). The term ‘modern energy’ currently refers to electricity, clean fuels and technologies for cooking
8 Decent work and economic growth
There is not room to review it here, only to comment that it is reasonable to doubt whether there can be economic growth, as measured by the usual metrics of GDP etc, consistent with ecological sustainability (Jackson, 2011).
11 Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.
e built environment and transport systems, each of which constitute huge infrastructures of energy demand with the ability to shape and lock in patterns of consumption over long periods
12 Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns.
13 Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.
16 Peace, justice and strong institutions.
political and procedural challenges of incorporating sufficiency into policy. Without strong and trusted legal frameworks and institutions, these challenges are likely to be insurmountable
The doughnut model
Planetary boundaries; based around the concept of universal human needs for a variety of goods, services and freedoms (water, income, education, resilience, voice, jobs, energy, social equity, gender equality, health, food), in line with the approach taken in setting the Sustainable Development Goals, and with Doyal and Gough’s (1991) theory of human need.
Critique of current economic thinking
transforming it into a discipline more capable of analysing the human condition and planning a better future
doughnut min max
(sufficiency as a restraint) and of minimum requirements (sufficiency as satisfaction, or ‘enough’)
The outer limits are large-scale, defined in quantitative terms, and rely heavily on expert judgement that has to be trusted by policy makers and underpinned by public support.
But the inner limits are minimum standards for human welfare in particular contexts, to be determined by some mix of expert and ‘lay’ judgement, using a mix of quantitative metrics and qualitative indicators.
There is little guidance on how to distribute available resources within the environmental boundaries of the doughnut; only that the distribution should be ‘just’.
It is assumed that everyone’s needs can be met within planetary limits, within an implied framework of liberal democracy where everyone has a voice.
actually describe the doughnut
picture
Defining energy sufficiency
Energy sufficiency is a state in which people’s basic needs for energy services are met equitably and ecological limits are respected.
What are ‘basic needs’?
Decision-makers inevitably have to face questions about where to draw the line between needs (and an imperative to meet them) and wants: what is essential and what might be desirable.
basic needs discussion:
whether human needs have any universal or objective features;
different approaches to - material and non-material necessities - absolute and relative norms - expert and public/’lay’ judgement about what are necessities.
physical health and autonomy
basic needs list
nutritious food and water;
protective housing;
a non-hazardous work environment;
a non-hazardous physical environment;
safe birth control and child-bearing;
appropriate health care; security in childhood;
significant primary relationships;
economic security;
physical security;
appropriate education.
means of satisfying these needs was culturally variable
welfare economics and preference satisfaction; hedonic psychology and happiness; and the capability approach developed by Sen (1999).
focussing not so much on what people have as on their state of being and what they can do (for example, being adequately fed, mobile and literate); on social arrangements as well as individual capacities (Robeyns 2006).
This proposes that individuals with more internal ‘capacities’ (e.g., education, mental health, physical strength) have more capabilities (more available choices, more freedom) and can fulfil more of their needs.
There is no upper limit on many of these capacities, though: at some point wants may again merge into needs and the environmental costs of meeting them become unsustainable.
environmental limits relate to
sources of energy for human use and the associated greenhouse gases and pollutants;
materials used in infrastructures of supply and demand (that is, everything from mines and power stations to pipes, wires, transformers, buildings, vehicles, roads, machine tools, heating systems and electrical appliances);
land and water used to provide energy services, whether this involves growing biomass, storing water for hydro generation or hosting mines and generating capacity.
There is a risk that focusing only on sufficiency in terms of demand reduction
takes attention away from the need to ensure adequate energy services for people who do not yet have them.
That is, sufficiency can be understood in terms of social wellbeing and equity.
When attention is focused on specific, conscious individual decisions and actions to change lifestyle
there is a danger of missing the unconscious, routine nature of many activities associated with energy consumption
Is energy sufficiency different from sustainable energy?
And it raises the difficult, unavoidable issue of distinguishing needs from wants.
Things to consider:
Scale – regional and local; bottom up
Timing - Networks are sized to deal with peak demand and ‘sharp’ peaks mean a lot of underused capacity: shifting usage away from peak times can be very valuable at system level (Pudjianto et al., 2014) but may reduce energy service levels at times (Bozarovski and Petrova, 2015). As renewables are integrated into electricity networks, a combination of demand, storage and supply need to be flexible and sufficient for agreed energy services at particular times and in particular places, as well as being sufficient to enable the whole system to operate effectively.
Equity - f growing income and wealth inequalities in the developed world; Greater public concern about inequity and fuel/energy poverty, if translated into political action, could assist in enabling more people to meet their basic energy service needs and in increasing equity (note that the first of these can be met without the second)
Technological development -
Demography – population; increase and decrease; household size
Policy
integrating thinking about systems of service provision and energy supply;
prioritising the use of ambient, untraded energy services (e.g. passive house design, natural cooling and ventilation);
valuing and enabling adaptive and non-expert ways of achieving comfort in buildings
developing skills and practical know-how for the above
developing energy sufficiency-based policy:
continued analysis of the implications for sufficiency policy of the Paris Agreement (for outer boundaries of the ‘doughnut’) and of SDGs (for the inner ring);
developing methods for building agreement on minimum standards for energy services;
revision and rethinking of building standards, including urgent attention to halting and reversing growth in air-conditioning;
addressing questions of excessive/aspirational consumption and
fostering environmentally-healthy social norms;
developing supportive non-energy policy, e.g. in relation to health and mobility, working hours and skills development for low-impact working and living;
building sufficiency considerations into smart grid development, recognising efficiency/flexibility trade-offs;
based on the subsidiarity principle, continuing to promote regional and local sufficiency policies within international/EU framework
– a debate with a long history – and considers whether and how such distinctions may be embodied in policies such as
rising block and demand-based tariffs,
energy labels based on consumption,
product bans and building standards to reduce and prevent energy / fuel poverty.
About the doughnut
Our definition of sufficiency mentions both ‘ecological limits’ and ‘basic needs’. The space between these upper and lower boundaries is where sufficient energy services sit. This can be visualised as a doughnut (Figure 1) - following the work of Kate Raworth. She developed a ‘doughnut diagram’ for Oxfam, a development NGO, which identifies a ‘safe and just space for humanity’ that lies between a ‘social foundation’ where basic needs are met, and an ‘environmental ceiling’(Raworth, 2012). The social foundation reflects the concept of universal human needs for a variety of goods, services and freedoms (water, income, education, resilience, voice, jobs, energy, social equity, gender equality, health, food), in line with the approach taken in setting the Sustainable Development Goals. Its environmental ceiling is defined in terms of nine planetary boundaries. Raworth’s subsequent book ‘Doughnut economics’ (Raworth, 2017) provides a critique of mainstream economic thinking and has developed new approaches to economic thinking to help deliver the safe and just space for humanity envisaged in the doughnut.
‘Need’ refers to
a particular category of goals which are held to be universalisable.
The universality of need rests on a belief that if needs are not satisfied then serious harm will result: ‘fundamental disablement in the pursuit of one’s vision of the good, whatever that vision is
The contrast with ‘wants’
goals that derive from an individual’s particular preferences – is central to the argument.
theory of habit,
arguing that it can provide a conceptual frame that acknowledges deeply held collective and individual dispositions for high energy consumption and provides insights into how low carbon policy can engage with high energy habits. This theory suggests more infrastructurally-oriented policies for reducing carbon emissions that would, for example,
reduce working hours and change the nature of work;
make collective transport more convenient and reasonably-priced; increase the sharing of living spaces and products; and
reduce the dependency of food systems on refrigeration
Energy policy would then face a number of new challenges, including to:
- establish what sufficient energy services are and ensure the sufficient energy services ‘cap’ is not exceeded;
- ensure all are able to meet their energy service needs through a combination of individual and public provision of infrastructure, heat/cooling and power;
- manage the transition from current energy services to the new, lower, sufficient energy services, in a way which is socially acceptable
- Policies to reduce energy service ‘wants’ and consequent energy consumption, could focus on reducing average consumption of energy, or could specifically target high consumption (or both, of course).
Household consumption
Particular products
Another sufficiency-related approach to electricity pricing links cost to the demand capacity of the customer: a ‘demand charge’ is a component of the tariff, so that customers pay more for the privilege of being able to operate several large appliances at once.
However, there are some examples of government policy which does seek to influence consumption - the case of the size of homes is considered briefly next.
‘bedroom tax’ - Governments tend to have views on how much residential space per person is acceptable. They may have both minimum and maximum standards for space per person / household – although the maximum typically only applies where housing costs are paid for or subsidised by the state. The ideas of both ‘under occupation’ and ‘over-crowding’ are common in the housing and social welfare literature, and government statistics. Two UK public policy decisions have tended to reduce residential space.
For some appliances, particularly cold appliances and washing machines, the efficiency standards are easier to reach in larger models, for technical reasons.
For appliances, it appears an efficiency label has generally been effective in supporting reductions in consumption.
This is shown by EU sales data for cold appliances (refrigerators, freezers and fridge-freezers), washing machines and tumble driers illustrates (Michel et al., 2015).
Energy is not used for its own sake
but as part goods and appliances the production of which requires energy (energy-built objects) of and in the course of practices
“Smart home technologies can solve the challenge of meeting the energy demand” -
efficiency framework’ because does not account for the rebound effect; technology will take us out of this – transfer the demand but it is within appliances and practices
foresight vs backcasting
Foresight:
You foresight what is going to happen in the future
Backcasting –> you imagine a future and how to get there
The built environment:
defining it
Constructions and infrastructures (roads, electricity
networks, waste disposal, metro networks, etc)
• All buildings, spaces and products that are created
or modified by people
• Affect indoor and outdoor space,
and physical and social environments
Taking the UK gov’t sustainable development Strategy that includes:
- Living within environmental limits
- Ensuring a strong, healthy, just society
- Achieving a sustainable economy
- Promoting good governance
- Using sound science responsibly
1Living within environmental limits • 2Ensuring a strong, healthy, just society • 3Achieving a sustainable economy • 4Promoting good governance • 5Using sound science responsibly
• 1 solar panels, LED light; sustainable
materials and healthy
• 2 accessibility (ramps), encouraging activity
(parks), social housing
• 3 infra for (public) transportation; circular
economy
• 4 provision of services as more
distributed/decentralized; public spaces for
interaction and support of democracy;
transparency of building industry; nondiscriminatory housing policies
• 5 use impact studies based on research to
make decisions
The built environment:
looking ahead through ‘foresight’
A ‘technique’ to look ahead • Why is it even needed? • Used as part of formal strategic exercizes in institutions • Can include scenarios, modelling or simulation, but is broader than that • Contrast with ‘backcasting’ • Tend to ‘extrapolate’ rather than reimagine
Unit 1, 2 and 3
• Unit 1
• What is practice theory?
• How is it different from practice theory, transition theory and efficiency?
• Unit 2
• How can you understand energy in the home using practice theory and efficiency as approaches?
• What are the issues with homes and energy in UK and Thailand?
• Concepts
• (smart) home and built environment; energy consumption & requirements; energy poverty and
fuel poverty
• Unit 3
• How do homes and infrastructures intersect?
• How does the built environment shape energy needs?
• Concept
• Energy sufficiency
what are practices?
Practices are a recognizable block of activity, or patterns of activity that are acted out
Practices conducted by users are affected by three elements:
• Meaning (reason behind the execution of a practice)
• Skill (the understanding of how to execute a practice)
• Technology (the objects & infrastructure necessary for practice)
A practice is not ‘anything you do’
Must be a recognizable block of activity, or patterns of activity that are acted out,
and through this performance, perpetuate the practice
• So not a one-off
• ‘recognizable’
Smart homes can help
Can help promote system efficiency by helping to reduce peak demand and
help match supply and demand (Gram-Hanssen & Darby 2018)
• This helps integrate more distributed and intermittent renewable energy
generation
Practices, infrastructure and demand
what we see as normal is contextual
•requires understanding process like electrification
• cannot be predicted a priori
• must consider which practices exist (as combination of skill, material
aspect and meaning) and how a process like electrification affects them
• there can be fairly rapid infrastructural change
• New grid connection replacing local systems
•In case of Ghana (Boamah article), new metering system, not trusted,
shift to home solar system
(Energy) sufficiency slide
Sufficiency is an amount of something that is enough for
a particular purpose
• “Energy sufficiency is a state in which people’s basic
needs for energy services are met equitably and
ecological limits are respected.”
• Recognizing absolute limits
• Boundaries on energy services in order to keep global
consumption within acceptable environmental limits
while allowing for growing demand in non-OECD
countries (Wilhite and Norgaard, 2003)
• Note global AND local
current planet boundaries doughnut
picture no. 2
Outside of the donut (3)
In Earth System:
• Concept of planetary boundaries
• ‘system thinking’
• In Introduction to sustainable energy transition
• What is potential of different sources?
• What are limitations of different systems?
In Ecosystem Processes and Climate Change:
• Specifics of different systems and their boundary conditions
In Homes and Cars:
• How to develop a system that remains between the outside and inside
of the donut
Once again in contrast:
Efficiency: air conditioners that use less energy • Sufficiency: delivering thermal comfort in way that has low environmental impact
Examples of Sufficiency Policies
Price Policies
Rising block tariffs: Increasing prices of kWh as consumption increases
Standing charges: fix prices + variable price (cost-reflective)
Demand charge: pricing links cost to the demand capacity of the customer (reduces peak
loads)
Reduce Number of “free” flighs per capita (e.g. taxes)
Buildings: Passive houses, greening, net positive; and long life, loose fit buildings,…
Sufficiency: high order concept
‘An organizing principle’ for the energy transition
• Translating needs, for example ‘protective housing’ into a housing
provision (square meters at so many degrees?)
• At what scale(s) is sufficiency most effectively addressed –
neighbourhood, city region, nation, continent, all of these? Do the
answers vary according to whether we are talking about built
environment, supply infrastructures, social norms or appliance
standards?
• Are needs negotiable? To what extent (Strengers article)
Sufficiency: closing remarks
In an energy-sufficient world,
planetary limits would not be breached
by providing humans with basic energy services
