Elsevier

Energy Research & Social Science

Volume 9, September 2015, Pages 98-106
Energy Research & Social Science

Original research article
Sociality and electricity in the United Kingdom: The influence of household dynamics on everyday consumption

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2015.08.027Get rights and content

Abstract

Our paper investigates household practices that use electricity, their relation to systems of provision and the enactment of domestic sociality. The results of this research conducted in the UK shed light on puzzling variations in electricity consumption across households posed by previous research. We argue for the need to attend to how household socialites influence and are influenced by electrical services and trace the links between these dynamics and the effects of wider cultural and socio-economic forces.

Introduction

In the UK technology continues to take centre stage in government and industry strategies intended to achieve changes in patterns of domestic electricity consumption towards using less electricity altogether or to reduce critical peak loads at certain times of day (DECC 2011). Providers and government agencies dispense advice about how to operate systems or appliances to optimize efficiency, and reduce peak demand, for example, buying an energy efficient washing machine, using an economy or low temperature wash programme, and running it at night-time. A range of time based rates are offered including time-of-use tariffs, critical peak pricing, and real-time (dynamic) pricing that seek to promote customer demand response based on price signals.

The authors of these technical and economic artefacts fail to recognise the socially shared and co-ordinated domestic practices that constitute residential electricity consumption. In this paper we argue that reducing domestic electricity consumption or encouraging customers to move their consumption away from periods of peak demand, such as early evening, is less a technical challenge and more a matter of understanding and responding to socio-cultural practices within and across households. Variations among households, such as income and house tenure are important factors, but when considered alone they are too crude to be indicators of customers’ willingness and ability to use less electricity and to time-shift their consumption to release pressure on generation and distribution during intensive peak periods [52] or towards times when fluctuating renewable generation is high [24].

We take the view that members’ positioning in relation to one another, together with interactions between them and between members and their physical surroundings, shape practices in which electricity is embedded. Our focus here is on understanding households as collective enterprises that are fabricated through patterns of everyday routines and interactions that entail the consumption of electricity.

Greater knowledge about what members of households do every day and a better understanding of the influences that shape household practices are required to inform effective policies and interventions aimed at reducing domestic energy consumption [23]. Although measuring energy use is important to quantify the dynamics of household consumption and how this might change, such metrics need supplementing by knowledge about practices in which electricity is embedded, their relation to systems of provision and connection to the enactment of sociality in households. We treat the household as a micro-level energy system—with specific logics and modus operandi—connected across its permeable and historically changeable boundaries to larger economic and social systems [70]. We adopt a socio-technical perspective that views the electricity system as a seamless web [33], which reaches deep into people’s domestic arrangements. The services electricity provides help structure the social organization and activities of household members and are integral to household management. By virtue of electrical power domestic chores, food preparation, personal care, laundry, recreation, media consumption, modes of communication and perceived levels of comfort are mediated through appliances that become normative and indispensable items for organising and sustaining household sociality.

In studying pro-environmental behaviours social scientists envisage society as constituted at different scales understood as macro, meso and micro levels. Studies at the macro-level are characterised as “having a central concern with the overall system, making it ‘top down’ analysis in research and policy making” Reid et al. [54,p. 310] while micro level studies tend towards behaviouristic models linked to the attitudes and motivations of individuals. The middle or meso-level of reality, where the household is positioned, brings the macro and micro levels together in a way that provides “both a frame for viewing the world and is simultaneously constituted by the processes and interactions within it” Reid et al. [54,p. 315]. This frame is valuable for considering contemporary forms of energy consumption that extend across multi-scalar networks linking individual users to distant sources of generation. The electricity network load, for example, is the aggregation, at different scales, of the multiple ways in which electricity is used across the distribution network. [52].

Theories of social practice—socio-cultural accounts of the practical undertakings of everyday life—embrace multi-scalar perspectives and are influential in revealing people’s relations with material technologies. Practice theorists stress the inclusion of material factors as one of several key elements that constitute a practice, or associated clusters of practices [68], [22]. Consumer studies provided new insights about the conditioning power of multiple social and cultural processes in maintaining stability or creating changes in people’s recruitment to and defection from practices, leading to a more social constructivist version of practice theory [26]. We employ that perspective to focus on how household sociality influences and is influenced by electrical services and how social dynamics, specifically those relating to gender, age generation and household fluidity, connect to wider cultural and socio-economic forces

The data for this paper derives from visits to the households of 131 domestic customers that formed part of The Customer-Led Network Revolution (CLNR) project in the North East of England.1 The project embraces a range of research activities such as power system monitoring of thermal and voltage ratings, the collection of consumption data, and a survey of British Gas domestic customers. Only data from the qualitative research with British Gas customers is discussed here. This qualitative research addressed the two main learning objectives of the project: to understand how people currently use electricity and to assess households’ capacities to develop flexibility through a range of interventions, for example by volunteers accepting time of use tariffs and others accepting direct control of wet white goods. Some work based on these objectives and relating to direct interventions has been published [52].

In this paper we examine issues pertaining to gender, generation and household fluidity. These topics arose through the processes of research and analysis, even though they were not directly addressed at the planning stage. We did not, for example, ask questions about which members of households performed which domestic tasks, but enough people raised them by their own volition to command attention. Similarly we did not start off by framing questions concerning the effects of economic recession leading to concerns about the increasing costs of electricity consumption relative to income and alterations in household composition. Our informants alerted us to their importance. These unexpected elements signalled the relevance of household dynamics and composition across time. They surfaced through researchers employing a semi-structured interview guide that allowed interviewees to raise unforeseen concerns.

Interview appointments were arranged with a single member of the household who opted into the research project after initial contact from either their energy supplier, British Gas or from a clustered group recruited through their social landlord, South Tyneside Homes. Research visits were conducted as socio-technical home tours in which participants were encouraged to guide researchers through their homes from one site of energy use to another. A feature of these tours was that other members of the household, and sometimes neighbours would participate in the conversation as new domestic practices and spaces were encountered. As a result many research visits featured multiple voices. The majority (68%), of household types interviewed were classified as ”'couples” or “family” with two or more members. Nearly half of our respondents (45%) stated they were retired, 24% working, 12% mixed (working/mixed duties), 5% unemployed, and 14% of informants refused to share the information (unassigned). Household income sources ranged from one member being in receipt of state benefits to households with two executive incomes. Retirees in the study ranged from those with just a state pension living in socially rented accommodation through to owner-occupier couples with significant private pensions.

The interviews were followed by a home tour to record how different rooms were used. Home tours are increasingly popular as a method for researching energy practices and are recognised as a valuable mechanism for engaging participants with technologies and other material features in their domestic settings and for eliciting context sensitive and socio-technically attuned responses [50], [28]. The home tour was concluded with a further wide-ranging conversation about households' current and possible future relationship to electricity use.

Evidence from empirical studies demonstrates significant variation in all forms of energy consumption between households. Variation is a consistent theme in energy studies at least since the 1980s [42]. Large degrees of variability in energy consumption have been observed, with higher consumers using between two and four times the amount of energy lower consuming households use, even for demographically similar families living in similar homes [18], [62]. In terms of total electrical energy consumption, [15] households with highest levels of demand use over nine times as much electricity as households with lower electricity demand while [25] observed demand varying up to 300% between identical homes in apartment complexes in California. In the UK context, an in-depth case study of 26 dwellings of uniform construction in the UK concluded that 37% of the variation in electrical consumption could be explained by occupants’ behaviours [17].

A number of reasons are proposed to explain variation in electricity consumption. Social theory and previous research suggest that household overall energy use is structured by household composition/dynamics, status-appropriate dwellings and appliances, and lifestyle-based behavior patterns [41]. Household electricity use is found to be strongly, but not solely, related to income levels (Yohanis et al. [73]; [14]. Using statistical regression analyses, [19] show that household size can account for 22–35% of the variation in electricity consumption when homes are grouped into broad dwelling types but other socio-economic features of household composition (age, income, education) only account for a small degree of the remaining variation. Two thirds of the variation in electricity consumption cannot be explained by socio-economic variables [19]. A study by [66] found a correlation between energy use and income but as the bandwidth of energy use is substantial within the same income category, not all variation can be explained by income. Thus, whilst income and socio-demographic characteristics can explain some consumption of overall energy use, and of electricity in particular, these factors do not fully explain variation.

The significance of increased amounts of electrical appliances and the ways they are used appears in several UK studies, for example [15], and Yohanis et al. [73]. An in depth end use monitoring study recording appliance consumption data for 400 households in Sweden [3] shows considerable variation in individual household consumption for different appliances, and the authors identify a need for further analysis of how household use their appliances, including how members interact with each other. The type of space heating (or cooling) influences electricity consumption; overall average consumption in UK households is higher where electricity is a primary or additional source of heating rather than gas.

Empirical studies suggest that patterns of energy consumption vary across the life cycle, between ethnic groups and cultural norms such as acceptable styles of lighting [42], [10], [29]. According to several studies, life-stage is important in determining electricity use. Data indicates that an older age group is associated with lower overall demand, and the study by Yohanis et al. [73] found that throughout the day and evening, over 65 year-olds consume the smallest amount of electricity, but 50–65 year-olds consume the largest. Further analysis by Yohanis et al. [73] found that homes with primary occupants between 50 and 65 have twice the evening electricity consumption of older occupants. Yohanis et al. [73] observe that the 50–65 year bracket includes those with higher household incomes and those living in larger houses.

The way that electricity using practices are contextualized and embedded within household dynamics and interpersonal relations is not well documented, although their significance for patterns of consumption is recognized within practice theory literature: as for example in the observation by Hand et al. [27,p. 678] that interpersonal relations and the coincidence of practices make home “a restless place”.

In the following section we address this gap by exploring three themes of gender, generation and fluidity in household composition that arose inductively during analysis of our findings. These themes were identified by employing a list of thematic codes, generated collaboratively and modified iteratively by the researchers as the project progressed. Firstly, we treat material referring to the gendered nature of electricity related practices; secondly we discuss the relevance of different age groups to patterns and meanings of consumption among household members. Finally, we turn to the sometimes turbulent dynamics of household composition whereby temporary residents, together with non-residents, exert influence on how households manage electricity use. Our focus is on households composed of members who are related as through consanguineal and affinal kinship, as opposed to households composed of members who share a dwelling, but do not regard one another as kin. The latter type of household was not represented in our sample.

Section snippets

Gender, generation and fluidity in kinship based households

We frame our findings by conceptualizing energy use as shaped through the interaction of five different core elements that together constitute social practices and the ways they are organised and distributed across space and time. We refer to this approach as the CCRES model of energy use. It is based on a socio-technical perspective [34], [57]. It also draws on recent thinking seeking to connect actor-network theory [39] and social practice theory [58], [53], [60] as discussed by [32], who

Conclusion

Far from being havens of mono-cultural stability, domestic households are dynamic hubs, swayed simultaneously by wider structural factors and their own idiosyncratic proclivities. Households are sites of negotiations between members, and often those of other related households, towards a micro-political settlement that is only ever temporary; given that the number and kinds of participants, their kinship relations, gender, stage in the life cycle and livelihoods, together with the household's

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    1

    Present address: Global Cities Research Institute, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia.

    2

    Present address: School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University, UK.

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