1. Prof. Karen Henwood, Prof. Nick Pidgeon, Dr
Christopher Groves, Dr Fiona Shirani, Dr Erin
Roberts
UNDERSTANDING RISK GROUP & SCHOOL OF SOCIAL
SCIENCES, CARDIFF UNIVERSITY
SOCIAL ACCEPTABILITY
& RESPONSIBLE
DEVELOPMENT OF
ENERGY SYSTEMS

2. WHOLE ENERGY SYSTEM OF THE FUTURE, IN A
WELSH SPECIFIC POLICY CONTEXT

3. FLEXIS DEMONSTRATOR SITE – PORT TALBOT
STEELWORKS AND REGION

4. FLEXIS SOCIAL SCIENCES –AN EXPANDED SOCIO-
TECHNICAL PROBLEM SPACE FOR INVESTIGATING
OUR ENERGY FUTURE
Understanding the whole energy
system of the future involves us
i) working in a shared socio-technical “problem
space” encompassing what is considered to be:
Possible/plausible and desirable
- We are mapping this out (our “issues space”)
- Engaging with publics/ideas about imagined
futures
ii) Understanding diverse impacts of dynamic
changes arising on daily life, the lifecourse, and
emergent socio-technical/systems
Smart - as an emergent (socio-technical & socio-
cultural) systems dynamic - will impact in ways that
matter greatly to people– raising non-trivial research
issues
Original image from woodybpower.biz

5. ‘SMART ENERGY’ – A
CONTEMPORARY ISSUE
within the ‘FLEXIS PROBLEM SPACE’
A KEY ISSUE
Challenges presented by “Energy Trilemma”
(approached as socio-technical problem space)
A KEY QUESTION
Where are opportunities and obstacles relating to
how people use energy? (for a wider picture see
energybiographies.org)
SMART HOMES Energy as central focus, with
two strategies;
• Creating smart consumers through real time
information
• Automating energy management
Image retrieved from UK Construction Week website:
http://www.ukconstructionweek.com/blog/innovation/1270-
meeting-the-energy-trilemma

6. MULTIPLE MEANINGS OF
‘SMART’
Interconnected
Intuitive
Innovative
Automatic
Convenient
Efficient
Digital
Control Managed at a distance
Responsive
Frictionless
Retrieved from
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/
2016/04/the-smart-home-of-
the-future-is-damn-hard-work/

8. SOCIAL SCIENCE
LITERATURE ON SMART
‘In seeking to perform a self-reproducing smart ontology in which human action is
framed around the idealised energy consumer – Resource Man – the Smart Utopia
excludes, ignores or seeks to eradicate the vast majority of human
experience and energy’s role within it.’
(Strengers, 2013; 155)
‘A fundamental problem with Resource Man… is that he is inadvertently
enrolled in consuming more resources. More specifically, his ‘smart lifestyle’
involves the establishment of new electricity-enabled ways of cooling, heating and
securing bodies and homes, as well as more energy-intensive ways of eating,
entertaining, working and playing… serious questions remain about the
sustainability of this global vision, in terms of both the energy required to
realise it and the environmental impacts of providing and consuming the energy
needed to perform it.’
(Strengers, 2013; 157)

9. SOCIAL SCIENCE
LITERATURE ON SMART
‘Whilst the SEMs [smart energy monitors] prompted some initial behavioural
changes to cut out unnecessary and wasteful energy use, once this ‘normal’ level
of consumption had been learnt, the monitors then appeared to be used only
for very specific reasons and to provide little or no motivation to reduce energy
consumption further — especially in the absence of wider policy and market
measures to save energy. Further, and perhaps worryingly, the monitors
appeared in some cases to have reinforced and hardened this ‘normal’ level of
consumption, leading householders to react defensively to any subsequent calls
to cut their energy use.’
(Hargreaves et al., 2013; 132)

10. By DANA HULL, BLOOMBERG NEWS |
PUBLISHED: May 10, 2010 at 12:26 pm | UPDATED: August 13, 2016 at 10:18 pm
After earlier insisting that only “a few”
customers with its new SmartMeters
received inaccurate utility bills, PG&E
acknowledged Monday that the number
may be as high as 23,000.
PG&E couldn’t say how many of those
customers were overcharged, how many were
undercharged or the total sum of the
inaccuracies. But the utility conceded it has
done a poor job responding to consumer
complaints about SmartMeters and announced
a major overhaul of its customer service efforts.
While we have confidence in this technology,
some of our customers question whether they
can have faith in our SmartMeter program, and
frankly in PG&E,” said Senior Vice President
Helen Burt, the chief customer officer.
“Restoring this trust is absolutely critical to us
[© Digital First Media 2017]

11. ENERGY BIOGRAPHIES
(2011-2016)
• Qualitative longitudinal study involving 4 community case sites
• 36 people took part in three interviews over the course of one year
• Participants also undertook photograph activities
• Final interviews focussed on the future and participants were shown
videos of imagined future homes, which included a range of
technological innovations

12. REFLECTING ON SMART HOMES

13. SMART UTOPIA?
“I think it’s a brilliant
idea you know this
challenge of having to
feed 9 billion people, the
more food production
you could get into city
flats the better. Yeah I
thought that was
wonderful.”
(Dennis, RFH) (Jonathan, Peterston)
“I think its although I’m environmentally minded I am
also taken by kind of gadgets so I can see nice things,
well built could inspire me but I don’t think that the
kind of thinking it may actually come up. Like the
fridge … it scans the items you put in and if you run
out of butter it sort of scans and then puts it on your
shopping electronically and it gets ordered and all this
but I still think it sort of dumbs us down as a kind of
society and replaces our you know ingenuity and our
thinking, free thinking with controlled you know
thinking and you know computerisation of everything
and but I think from in terms of self-cleaning tiles and
surfaces you know why not?”

14. COSTS OF SMART
“But there’s a price to pay for it and it’s not just the
money, you know you walk around the city and it looks
pretty dire sometimes and everyone is in their little houses
and you know in lots of futuristic films you see cities of the
future and they look, they’re wrecked, everything looks
dreadful, there’s advertising hoardings everywhere and
you know people are flying around on hover boards and
stuff but the actual cities are dirty and it’s kind of realising
that as people create their environments in their minds
and in their interiors they’re less bothered about what’s
going on out there.”
(Jack, Ely)

15. ENABLING
TECHNOLOGIES
Doug Joan
“I’m just learning at the moment but the future is to have
everything controllable without getting out of my settee, just
because I love gadgets and I just oh I love it, that’s the best
thing I’ve ever bought that is [Amazon Alexa].”
“When we had our new boiler fitted I had one of these fancy Hive
thermostats fitted and it, it’s mad, it sends me, it sends me a report
every month to tell me how warm my house is compared to other
users nearby. Now I don’t know how many users there are nearby
because they don’t tell you that, but we’re usually about half a degree
warmer on average than our closest neighbours.”
“And if you go away it will email to say your
house is at such and such degrees, do you
want to turn the heating up for half an hour,
it’s like what? [laughs]”

16. SMART TECHNOLOGIES & ENHANCING THE
ENERGY FUTURE
What do smart technologies, contracts and systems offer? How transformative?
Concept of smart energy futures is not without controversy; questions opened up by intangible
dependencies – e.g. in the home valuing automation over felt connection with things that matter/make a life
worth living (cf importance of not feeling dumbed down by distancing from energy infrastructure)
Transactive energy? Non-consumerist, for grid resilience & energy security?
Smart as automation/rendering invisible of energy as an object of transactions, while some of the other
infrastructure needed to make it work (eg houses as power stations) is about making dependency on energy
more visible
How well attuned is generating satisfaction with new energy platform for goods and services to dealing with
decarbonising the energy system?
Some engineering interest : work on power electronics and grid balancing
Smart revolution has key implication; conceiving of energy less as a valuable (but resource limited) commodity
and something more intangible to be traded within a smart system
It is unlikely to be a one way benefit; real world public dialogue brings opportunities for reflection on questions
of socially acceptability of, and responsiveness to, unintended consequences & specific challenges bound up
with these digital revolutions of data and consumer products

17. Thanks for listening
Diolch am wrando
http://www.flexis.wales
http://www.energybiographies.org

18. FLEXIBLE, INTEGRATED
ENERGY SYSTEMS (Flexis)
(2016-2021)
WP3
•Communities,
Energy
Controversies and
Risk Governance
WP2
•Energy System
Change and
Everyday Life
WP1
•Flexible
Systems and
Expert Visions
• Engineering and Social Science
network exploring energy system
transition
• Three social science work
packages