Understanding Demand
Influencing Demand
Policies for steering demand
Invisible energy policy
Adapting social practices
Commission on Travel Demand
How Demand Varies
Situations, Sites, Sectors
Domestic IT use
Home heating
Offices and office work
Business travel
Online shopping
Car dependence
Older people and mobile lives
Local smart grids
Cooking and cooling in Asia
Energy, Justice and Poverty
Seminars
Installer businesses and renewable energy uptake in homes. Richard Hanna
Richard talked about his PhD research into the world of small businesses involved in installing solar panels, heat pumps and other forms of microgeneration. We learned about rapid developments in the installer world: the crazy rush up to the point when the feed in tariff changed, and the ebb and flow of contractors from plumbing and electrical work into, and then back out of the more…
View full post →Car dependence: Micro-, macro- and meso-approaches to the study of social barriers to sustainable transport. Giulio Mattioli
Giulio set out what might be thought of as an ‘anatomy’ of car dependence, distinguishing between representations of car dependence as a characteristic of people, places or practices. He went into detail, thinking about the forms of disadvantage that might be involved, depending on the specific interaction between people and places (who has a car, how much does having a car matter, where…
View full post →Home heating: Technologies, practices and prospects. Matt Lipson
Home heating accounts for a significant proportion of energy use in the UK. In this talk, Matt discussed options and possibilities for home heating, now and in the future.
View full post →Smarter and more transparent than you: Technicians and users scripting the user’s role in smart grid experiments. Catherine Grandclément
Techno-futurists scenarios of “the smart grid” treasure the “active consumer”, a consumer who will be able to “interact” with the electricity grid: get informed especially through price signals and manage its consumption but also production accordingly. (more…)
View full post →Competing notions of social change and intervention in local climate change governance: The case of Copenhagen. Sara Berthou
Sara's presentation discussed a study based on ethnographic fieldwork to examine the production of a Local Agenda 21-plan within Copenhagen. Using the Local Agenda 21-plan as a starting point, her study uses practice theory to look at how policy-makers think of their role in relation to creating social change, how they conceptualise social change and how this translates into specific problem…
View full post →