Unpacking the household
The load unit multiple!
Hello folks and welcome back to another edition of The Social Life of Energy 🤗.
Last week, I talked about how productive it can be when people are forced out of their habits and get a change of perspective in return. This week we’ll continue a little in that same spirit in an interview with Karthikeya Acharya, a design researcher working on various domestic energy technologies at Aarhus University. He likes to see what happens, not necessarily when you step and think outside out of the box, but at least when you open it up, catch some fresh air and take a look around.
I wanted to talk to him because of earlier issues that addressed the need for the energy sector to understand households not as single units, but as comprising multiple individuals with different needs and relations to the home and its energy consumption.
“Everybody agrees that consumers are important, but nobody actually attempts to characterize consumers and their potentials more specifically “because it is so terribly difficult [...] nobody has a clue how to embrace and engage consumers” (Danish smart-grid strategist in Schick & Gad 2015, p 56; from this earlier edition).
As it so happens, Karthik has thought a lot about the relations that make up a household, so let’s dive right in.
Ordinarily, I would also publish a podcast version of this edition, but unfortunately ghosts in the recording machine produced high-pitched sounds that I would not wish to inflict on your finely tuned ear drums.
An example of him opening up a box is his research experiment to make household energy data public. Intermittently over a period of three years or so, Karthik stayed with an Indian community of some 190 households. At some point he convinced them to make their energy data public, as a kind of art installation. Fun!
The households were mostly upper middle-class Indian homes. And their consumption levels are almost that of the average Japanese. There are about 200 to almost 300 million people in India who live basically like Japanese in terms of just the energy consumption. So that's, you know, that's quite significant.
When we made the data public, people would comment like, ‘Oh, I need to cook for my children and that is why I use so much energy’. Because there you are, standing in front of your data, and there are other people around you. There’s this moment of justification, why your consumption is so much more compared to others.
To Karthik it was significant how people were justifying their energy use in the name of other members of the household. The life of household energy is, also, as it turns out, social.
Dwelling on the household
So, let’s consider the household a little more. But let’s use ‘home’ instead, as it is more commonly known by humans. Karthik says the key that unlocks the feeling of home is the idea and ability of exerting control over your physical environment.
You do not have control over what music plays inside of a tram or the kind of lighting in the train. You do not have access to things that make up your physical environment. But when you come home, there is some sort of control – I wouldn't say direct control, but it is the idea of control.
So, it is that kind of physical access to things that make up your environment, your immediate environment, that is where you start dwelling. And this is completely or largely mediated today by electro-networks.
All the little things you do to ‘make yourself at home’ is “dwelling”. Crucially,
this is not just physical and just making up your own kind of bubble, a sweet cosy space, and it's not just about watching a movie with dim light, but it also deeply relates to the development of your relationships with your family members in a household.
Exerting control over your physical environment is rarely about just one person. Think about figuring out what kind of renovations to undertake, how warm a room should be, how often you should do laundry or take a shower. Dwelling practices are negotiated and ‘justified’ in terms of familial relations.
Comfort is a question of accommodation and relations that can be variously answered. (Jo Zimny Photos, Flickr.)
People as infrastructure
So, while people might technically exert ‘control’ over their home, they don’t always actually feel like they’re ‘in control’. I therefore asked him about what happens when we chip a little away at our technical control through newfangled automated demand response schemes.
You know, we don't see the long-term implications of it, it's very difficult to say, right? Because it is not just a matter of utility, it is much more than that.
To understand why he’s saying this, we need a little detour through one of his other studies, that of rural microgrid systems in India. The Indian government has pledged to electrify every village, but the logistics of extending the main grid has proved daunting, so microgrids are filling in some of the gaps.
Now, on the whole, (rural) microgrids are great. They’re definitely a way to speed up electrification that would otherwise not be possible. But the economics of it are tricky, which usually means they’re out of reach for the poorest.
In the villages where Karthik (and co-author Lindsay Simmonds) did their research:
The cost of energy for those [on prepaid microgrid] is so high. You know, they are paying, I think, almost 50 times more per kilowatt hour than the households [from the public energy data experiment]. So the amount of money that people end up paying, just for a few lights, it'd be almost 10% of their daily earnings. And nobody really talks about that; they just talk about access to energy.
These micro grids are so expensive because they are being pushed through these private entities and not as a right. They are being pushed with investors coming in from elsewhere, and the (cost of the) capital infrastructure is really high.
With that in the back of your mind, consider the following scene. At 8 PM a mother realizes the balance on her prepaid electricity meter is running low. She calls for her eight year old son to get the meter recharged. She takes out a dongle from the meter, passes it to her son, who dashes out to the village microgrid ‘reseller’, who recharges the dongle with the central meter by punching in the desired amount. After adding the transaction to the ledger, the boy runs back home with the dongle, where, once plugged back in, life can go on as planned. (Acharya & Simmonds, p 38f.)
Unplugging and recharging the prepaid dongle. Pictures by authors.
The young son, by running out to the shop, he's doing his duty to keep up the electricity at home. And so, there is a kind of development of a familial relation: the boy could feel, ‘I have done my duty for the family to keep the lights on’.
People are moving, without having a choice almost, to make the infrastructure work: the network of the relationships of the family are becoming part of the infrastructure just to keep a few LED lights on.
Karthik not only argues that “relationships become the infrastructure for service delivery”, but he also paints the picture of a moral universe, if you will, in which the electricity becomes part of familial relations, where what it means to be a son is in part determined by the family’s need for electricity.
This idea informed his answer to my question about demand-response through automated energy management services. Utilities simply don’t know what it will do. For example, heating, “the playground of the utility companies”, is crucial to well-being and comfort, as researchers have noted again and again. Hence it is also typically and crucially involved in care-giving within the household.
Ceding access to control over heating might mean no longer being able to meet specific household needs. In a worst-case scenario we get to a system where someone could be penalized with higher fees for consuming more than average for her household, or overriding demand response systems, because the system can’t take into account that his council home hasn’t been renovated yet and that he’s taking care of a sick parent who needs the place to be warm.
The sociable life of electricity
In other words, Karthik warns about the potential impact of energy delivery on household relations. The two are related and relations will therefore change when delivery infrastructure changes.
But he’d also like to think about the possibilities for good that that connection might afford. Is there some way that we could design an energy delivery system that encourages care in our relationships? One where people also have some choice?
Maybe a non- or less-automated demand response system could do the trick. The problem with consumer demand response generally is that individual contributions only become significant in aggregate. That also means there is little financial gain – and thus financial incentive – in shifting energy use. Automation is one attempt to solve that problem, taking volition out of the equation. But:
If I were are asked ‘charge your car at this time’, maybe I would be willing to do that if over, say, a one-week period, I got a free coffee and a cake with my neighbour, or a friend that I had chosen. Courtesy of my utility, with a person and for an ‘energy reward’ of my choosing.
Tying the social and energy consumption together in that way might make electricity - something “boring and banal” - exciting, or at the very least meaningful. That - and then we come full circle - was precisely the premise of the notion of “public participation” from last issue. Get people emotionally and intellectually involved, and then don’t forget to ask for their opinion and insight!
On this hopeful thought I will bid thee adieu. However, if you’d like to know more, you have choices! You could go to the ‘Read more’ section below and check out some Karthik’s articles. You could also get in touch with him. Find his email here or link up with him on er… well you get it.
Take care and till next time,
Marten
To know more
Another thought experiment about giving the mutual imbrication of energy and household relations a positive spin. Energy saving gains could be transferred to a household member.
“Ignore the IOT part of it, it is only to fit it into the conference.”
Electrome, or, My Home as an Electric Thing
A super short think piece about ‘dwelling’ as exercising control.
A Curated Chronology: Traits of Electrical Energy from Research-through-Design Practices
Abstract of a paper that will soon be up. A global survey of the research-through-design field in energy studies.
The Role of Familial Relations in the Infrastructure of a Prepaid Domestic Energy Service
The article cited earlier about ‘familial infrastructure’ in the service of energy provisioning.