Wilcox+Overview

MEMO: Draft Overview Wilcox, Spring 2013

** Reimagining Energy Interventions: Discourses, Practices, Policies ** The imperative to reduce energy use across all sectors of society is only growing more urgent as the costs to human and environmental health and well being from climate change, fuel extraction, and energy system operation increase. Yet U.S. per capita energy use continues to remain extremely high—nearly five times the world average—even as demand for energy increases around the globe (U.S. EIA 2011). An increasing number of relatively well-supported policy initiatives have been successful at keeping overall residential energy use levels from rising over the past thirty years, however meaningful reductions have also proven elusive (U.S. EIA 2012).

The aim of this study is to understand why collective efforts to achieve significant reductions in residential energy use return only marginal, temporary results. Specifically, I am interested in the following questions:


 * How do interventions aimed at influencing everyday energy use, initiated by institutions such as government agencies, advocacy organizations, and design firms, impact modes of user engagement with energy systems?
 * What is the relationship between collective understandings of energy issues and institutional strategies of understanding and influencing the drivers of energy demand, and how does these dynamics affect everyday energy use practices?
 * How do the material, organizational, and discursive characteristics of dominant and alternative “energy regimes” shape forms of user participation in energy system operations?

To answer these questions, I will use multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1995), a mode of inquiry well-suited to problems that span multiple sites, scales, and data sources, to “follow” meso-level (New York State) energy policies across contexts and settings, tracing the practices and relationships they foster across diverse subject populations.

Whether implicit or explicit, institutional interventions—such as technological efficiency standards, home energy assessments and subsidized retrofit financing, the design and deployment of energy monitoring technologies, or the development of new organizational forms energy production and consumption—are generally predicated upon an understanding of energy demand as driven by a combination of consumer preference and technological efficiency. In these cases energy demand functions as a “black box,” an entity whose internal complexity is obscured to facilitate simple, taken-for-granted functionality (Latour 1987). Recent social scientific studies of energy use practices have focused on the interrelations between the social, cultural, and technical dimensions of energy use, implying that energy demand can be better understood as an integrated “sociotechnical” problem, rather than as a function of psychological complexity on the one hand and technological complexity on the other. In opening the black box of residential energy demand to analytic scrutiny, this study further develops theories of everyday sociotechnical change while offering designers of conventional and unconventional interventions empirically-based analysis and recommendations.

This study will advance social scientific conceptualization of energy use and demand at multiple scales, from national and global “energy imaginaries” and “energy regimes” through middle-level system operations to local interventions that influence—or fail to influence—energy-intensive practices. It will draw on and contribute to scholarly literatures that examine the role of socio-technical practices in (un)sustainable patterns of living, including the politics of design and technology, social practice theories, and sociotechnical imaginaries.

Moreover, the results of this study will help inform the conceptualization and design of institutional interventions, such as energy policies and programs, aimed at demand management and system-wide resilience. In analyzing traditional policy interventions alongside design-based strategies, I seek to generate creative approaches to energy-oriented problem solving that might be missed in policy analyses focused solely on governance institutions. This approach has both scholarly and practical significance, as STS-based contributions are becoming increasingly important to the scholarly and professional energy policy community. Such efforts are key to larger issues of climate change and greenhouse gas emission reduction, energy security, and societal resilience in the face of potential disruptions to systems of provision.