While energy consumption is necessary to support people’s everyday lives in a material and instrumental sense, the ways in which energy is used are also constitutive of ways of life and of identities. The Energy Biographies project at Cardiff University has used biographical narrative interviews and multimodal methods across four case sites in the UK to investigate this constitutive meaning of energy consumption, and its implications for attempts to reduce energy demand. Our data demonstrates the importance of emotional attachments to practices and technologies that consume energy, and the ways in which these attachments support valued identities, particularly when people undergo difficult lifecourse transitions. We show how a biographical approach can help us appreciate the ways in which ethical and moral conflicts emerge out of everyday energy consumption, not just around the priorities accorded to different values (like convenience, cost, comfort and luxury) but around what are in effect competing ethical frameworks used by people to guide them in balancing their attachments, and thus in determining how to use energy (including e.g. caring commitments to others, the costs and benefits of using energy, the plurality of values that make up a ‘good life’, or deontological rules). We thus show how qualitative biographical approaches can reveal the ethical investments and conflicts that are embedded in the thick texture of everyday life, and how the ethical significance of energy in the everyday lies in the diverse ways in which it comes to matter to us through the lifecourse.

1. Christopher Groves, Karen Henwood, Catherine
Butler, Karen Parkhill, Nick Pidgeon and Fiona Shirani
Energy Biographies Project
(http://energybiographies.org)
School of Social Sciences
Cardiff University
http://cardiff.academia.edu/ChristopherGroves

2. • Energy as an abstract
resource
▫ E.g. Vaclav Smil (2003):
just distribution of energy
= 60-110GJ annually per
capita worldwide
• Overly reductive
understanding of need

3. • Needs are always fulfilled through
particular & singular, culturally &
individually significant objects
• Difference between
thinking of
▫ Food as X calories per day
▫ Food as kosher, halal etc.
• Consumption makes
meaning, produces identity

4. “The meaning of our lives cannot,
therefore, be understood as a
search to satisfy generalizable
needs for food, shelter, sex,
company and so on, as if our
particular relationships were
simply how we have provided for
them. It is more the other way
round: without attachments we
lose our appetite for life”
Peter Marris (1996), The politics of uncertainty,
Routledge

5. ‘[lived experience]
encompasses both the “rage
for order” and the impulse that
drives us to unsettle or
confound the fixed order of
things’
A universal human concern
with the ‘precarious and
perilous character of existence’
Michael Jackson (1989), Paths towards
a clearing, p. 2 and p. 16
Relation
ships
Practices
Definition and
fulfilment of
need
Reduction of
material/
emotional
uncertainty

6. • Practices threaded with
relationships
• Shape sense of who we
are and what we can do
(identity and agency)
• Also sustain shared
ethical sensibilities about
what should be done to
live a properly human
life
• Other threads: socio-
technical/material
arrangements (Shove,
Pantzar and Watson
,2012)
▫ Objects, tools,
devices,
infrastructures

8. • But the weave can be
snagged or tangled
• Voluntary/ involuntary
lifecourse transitions
connected to intense
ethical reflection on
practices and forms of
life, as identities shift
(Hards, 2011)
Relation
ships
Practices
Definition and
fulfilment of
need
Reduction of
material/
emotional
uncertainty
Devices/
infrastructures

9. • 3 longitudinal
interviews (original
group of 74 in first
round narrowed down
to 36 for rounds 2 & 3)
• 6 months between
interviews
• QLL biographical
interviews 2011-13
• Participant
photography tasks

11. ‘Lucy’ (Peterston) ‘Christine’ (Ely)
• Lives in affluent rural
commuter village
• Mid-30s, white/Welsh
• Husband, two young
children
• Recently moved from
London to rented house
while renovating another
• Recently given up well-paid
job to look after children full-
time
• Lives in deprived inner-city
ward
• Early 50s, white/Welsh
• Husband, four children (one
with additional needs)
• Recently became
unemployed
• Recently took in elderly
father-in-law (who died
during period of interviews)

12. “I don’t think I really feel guilty I
just think I’m aware and it does
make me cross when like Sean
especially just is deliberately
almost you know wasting it
[…]”
‘I never really wanted to
waste money, energy but
now I think it’s just, when I got
my last energy bill, I couldn't
believe it.’
[…] now we are obviously heating a much bigger place, and
um, ah you know being here in the day and using tumble
dryers and dishwashers and all of that kind of stuff so, it’s
really seen a massive increase […].

13. • ‘a lot of people come here and
complain that it’s cold’
• […] we have a log fire and we are
getting a log fire and how actually
they’re probably super inefficient
aren’t they in heating a room? […]
we’ve put massive radiators in our new
house cos its really Victorian, tall
ceilings, and so we just don’t need a
wood burner to be on at any point but
actually it’ll sort of make the room
[…]

14. • ‘We do love our patio heater when it’s a sunny
evening but it gets a bit cold and dark and you can sit
out and they’re like probably the worst things
aren’t they? But we love it well we only use it about
five times a year so it’s OK.’
• ‘Cos we love being outside, we just love that you can
you know go, we were sitting out there one evening
… it was like midnight and you could have a drink
outside still and it’s so lovely here cos it’s so quiet
and everything so but you wouldn’t have been able to
do it without that so or you would have been
freezing. So that’s our kind of, we know it’s really
bad but we’re still going to use it.’

15. The rebuilder
• ‘a run-down property that myself and my
first husband renovated’
• ‘[…] the idea was to convert the double
garage into a unit specifically for [disabled
son], so it was self-contained and that's
what we did […]’

16. The caring parent
• ‘Some are subtle changes that you don't realise until you
think about 'oh okay!' our way of living is always like this.
Like I said, right at the very beginning, kids leave, kids
come back whether it's University or whether [...]whether
they move in with a partner, whether that relationship
suffers and they come back, they always come back to
mum. ’
• Oh God, I literally, you just don't know what's around the
corner […] so we don't look into the future as such.

17. Lucy Christine
• The wise manager
▫ Identifying waste
▫ Cost-benefit framework
• The good host
▫ Constitutive values
• ‘We know it’s bad but we’re
still going to use it’.
• The rebuilder
▫ Managing disruption
▫ Needs balanced against , costs
• Caring parent
▫ Constitutive responsibilities
to others
• ‘Oh God, I literally, you just
don't know what's around the
corner […] so we don't look into
the future as such.’

18. • Conflicting identities
& commitments
• Commitments ≠
subjective preferences
• Commitments are
reasons for acting that
represent evaluations
of what matters for a
genuinely human life
• E.g. Lucy’s patio heater:
‘we’re still going to use it’
▫ The ethical value of the
heater: sustaining an
identity, sustaining
friendships
▫ Might be right or wrong
– but opens a space of
argument, not simply
brute assertion of
preferences

19. • Weaves, snags, tangles produce
identities and normative
commitments
• Trying to change how energy is
consumed can challenge these
identities and commitments
• Points beyond distributive energy
justice and towards justice as
procedural (who decides what
matters) and as recognition
(understanding the specific value of
particular identities) (Schlosberg,
2013)
Commitments can
be
• Unspeakable
• a source of
shame, anxiety
or discomfort,
• disavowed

20. Relevant publications
Groves, C. et al (2015) Energy biographies Science, Technology and
Human Values
Groves, C. et al (2016) 'Invested in unsustainability? On the
psychosocial patterning of engagement in practices', Environmental
Values forthcoming (June 2016)
http://energybiographies.org