Energy Research & Social Science 102 (2023) 103165
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Energy Research & Social Science
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/erss
Original research article
Energy platforms and the future of energy citizenship☆
Marten Boekelo, Sanneke Kloppenburg *
Wageningen University, Environmental Policy Group, Hollandseweg 1, 6706 KN Wageningen, the Netherlands.
A R T I C L E I N F O
A B S T R A C T
Keywords:
Energy platforms
Energy citizenship
Digitalisation
Agency
Energy communities
Energy platforms involve citizens in the energy system by creating and orchestrating virtual energy collectives
that can support energy system governance. In such an energy collective, households pool their resources to
engage in energy trading, collective self-consumption, or grid balancing. In this paper we draw on the theory of
material participation to examine how everyday interactions with energy platform technologies enable people to
enact energy citizenship. Our findings from interviews and workshops in a demonstration project of an energy
platform show that energy platforms complicate the notion of being an energy citizen. For the householders in
our research, engaging in new collective energy practices disturbed the existing link between domestic energy
practices and energy citizenship. Where people's energy citizenship used to be centred around their own do­
mestic domain, engagement with platform technologies required them to reflect on their position in relation to
new issues such as the ‘greenness’ of various energy markets. Moreover, people were confused about the relation
between their own agency and goals as an energy citizen, vis-a-vis the collective agency that results from the
bundling of energy practices, and the power and motivations of platform providers and energy system actors.
Uncertainties around agency and responsibility need to be reduced if platform-based energy collectives are to
play a role in fostering meaningful citizen participation in the energy transition. For platform providers, this
implies acknowledging people's existing practices and trajectories of energy citizenship, and providing feedback
about the contributions people are making.
1. Introduction
A recent development in the decentralisation and digitalisation of
the energy system is the emergence of energy platforms. Energy plat­
forms can be defined as digital infrastructures that connect small-scale
energy producers and consumers and facilitate transactions between
them [15]. By linking domestic devices such as solar panels and home
batteries of different households, these digital infrastructures create a
common pool of energy that can be managed for purposes such as energy
sharing, trading, or providing grid balancing services. For householders,
joining an energy platform opens up possibilities to participate in the
energy system and its governance in new ways. Together, as a virtual
energy collective, they can optimise self-consumption of green energy,
or participate in energy and demand response markets.
In this article, we understand the energy platform as an energy
technology that brings the energy system closer to people's everyday
lives, and could provide them with new possibilities to exercise energy
citizenship. To conceptualise this, we draw on approaches in the energy
social sciences that highlight how energy technologies that are located
in or close to people's homes enable participation and engagement in the
energy transition [18,30]. Rooftop solar panels and energy monitoring
devices, for example, enable people to generate their own green energy
and to monitor and manage energy flows at household level. Through
everyday interactions with such objects and technologies, people can
become aware of new issues, such as the fluctuating availability of green
electricity, and adapt their behaviour accordingly (shifting electricity
consumption to midday, for example) or make new purchasing decisions
(an EV or household battery). In other words, they start to engage
actively with the energy transition. Such everyday objects and practices
then can be seen as a domain in which people enact their citizenship, as
members of the public [18].
This understanding of citizenship, which emphasizes its everyday
and physical dimensions, is different from more conventional con­
ceptualisations of citizenship as of political activism, citizen consulta­
tion, or involvement in grassroots initiatives [5]. We adopt this
perspective, the so-called theory of material participation [18], because
This work was supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research NWO under Grant number 408.URS+.16.004.
* Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: marten.boekelo@duneworks.nl (M. Boekelo), sanneke.kloppenburg@wur.nl (S. Kloppenburg).
☆
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2023.103165
Received 23 December 2022; Received in revised form 21 April 2023; Accepted 2 June 2023
Available online 19 June 2023
2214-6296/© 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
M. Boekelo and S. Kloppenburg
Energy Research & Social Science 102 (2023) 103165
it is particularly suitable for understanding people's engagement with
what has been called ‘the next phase of the energy transition’, in which
we witness complex interactions of multiple technologies and sectors
[17,42]. In particular, when smart grid technology enters the household
and stimulates householders to manage their energy practices in
accordance with the needs of the grid, everyday domestic energy con­
sumption practices become rearticulated as a public issue [40]. At the
same time, smart grid technology often relies on automation of these
energy practices through the use of smart devices. A growing number of
studies have shown that householders experience a lack of control and
autonomy in enacting energy citizenship in the smart grid
[12,13,22,35]. Moreover, householders express fears that with the smart
grid, a market logic enters the domestic sphere [40]. Hence, the easy
transition from rooftop PV to new consumption practices and new
energy-conscious purchases that we sketched out above starts to hamper
with the introduction of smart grid technologies and associated business
models. These reconfigure domestic energy practices in ways that
complicate people's earlier notions of energy citizenship as
prosumption.
In distinction to older forms of smart energy, platforms also add a
collective logic to the engagements with energy. Platforms bundle do­
mestic energy practices, in the sense that people's practices of producing,
storing, and consuming energy in their household are orchestrated in
tandem with those of occupants of other households, thus creating (a
kind of) collective agency. But the connection of distributed individual
households through a digital infrastructure can be accomplished to
various ends: as part of an energy community that wants to maximise its
PV self-consumption, or as a customer in an energy trading collective.
Given these new twin dimensions, we wonder: How do householders
experience the new forms of collective agency with regards to energy?
Do platforms enable them to engage with issues that they are concerned
about, and accordingly intervene in the energy system in a way that is
meaningful to them? Do platforms facilitate householders to take up the
roles and responsibilities they aspire to take up in the energy system?
These questions translate in the following overarching research
question: how does participation in energy platforms affect practices
and experiences of mundane energy citizenship? In order to address this
question, we build on our research in a demonstration project of a
“Virtual Power Plant” (VPP)1 in Amsterdam. We surveyed and inter­
viewed participants, coordinated and collaborated with project leaders
and organized workshops with its stakeholders. In Section 2, we first
discuss energy citizenship from the perspective of material participa­
tion, and explain how platforms can be analysed as a technology for
collective participation. Next, we introduce the case of the Virtual Power
Plant project, and the methods we used to research the experiences of
the householders. In Section 3, we show how the new material en­
gagements that energy platforms offer do not automatically result in
meaningful new experiences of energy citizenship for householders. In a
nutshell, the householders experienced a tension between acting for the
sake of the energy system and working towards one's own sustainability
project. Building on these findings, we end by discussing the potentials
and limitations of platform-based citizenship in the future electricity
grid, and draw out implications for the conceptualisation of energy
citizenship in the context of a digitalised energy system.
2. Energy citizenship and material participation
With the decentralisation of the energy system, energy technologies
are increasingly situated in people's everyday environments. According
to an early perspective by Devine-Wright [8], this might lead to occa­
sions in which citizens increase their understanding of energy topics and
become more excited about getting involved in them. As Devine-Wright
explains it:
Energy citizens can feel positive and excited about new energy
technologies rather than apathetic and disinterested; be aware rather
than ignorant of the scale of its potential impacts on political in­
stitutions, the environment and everyday lifestyles; and be willing to
engage not just as individuals but as collectives in shaping techno­
logical change at local, regional and national levels. ([8], p.77)
In other words, “decentralized energy technologies can foster new
ways of thinking and behaving about energy” ([8], p.77). Not only
would people's awareness of energy and climate change issues grow
through these close encounters, according to Devine-Wright, gleaning
insights from the “environmental citizenship” literature (e.g. [9]), peo­
ple would also develop a sense of responsibility towards future gener­
ations and become willing to engage in collective action. In short, a new
energy public would rise up.
While we are sympathetic to this argument, in this paper we would
like to take an analytical step back. We do not dispute that decentralised
energy technologies can foster new ways of thinking and behaving about
energy per se, but to the extent that they do, we want to understand how.
The literature rebounds with examples in which local renewables did
not inspire a greater sense of personal responsibility. In fact, Silvast and
Valkenburg [33] argue that the concept of citizenship should encompass
both action that supports and endorses energy transitions as well as
protest and contestations. In that spirit, we want to propose the
following open definition of energy citizenship. We use the term energy
citizenship primarily to capture the way people identify a problem of
common or public concern and how they allocate responsibility for who
is to deal with that problem. Some people will assume part of that re­
sponsibility, others may abdicate it in favour of other actors, such as the
state, semi-public (regulatory) entities or even private enterprises. We
will also use energy citizenship to refer to the practices that people use to
exercise their agency and assume the role they believe or aspire to play.
Our subsequent step forward hones in on the processes through
which people's interactions with decentralised energy technologies lead
to new ways of thinking and behaving – or not. To understand these
processes, and thus assess Devine-Wright's claims, we borrow tools from
a distinct analytical apparatus: the theory of material participation by
Marres (2018). This theory argues (distinct forms of) energy citizenship
manifests in relation to specific kind of technologies and infrastructures
in people's homes. Especially noteworthy here is Ryghaug et al.'s
agenda-setting work on “mundane energy citizenship”. Mundane energy
citizenship consists of “awareness”, “knowledge” and “practices” ([30],
p.290). This concept therefore hews quite closely to Devine-Wright's
conception of energy citizenship, but the addition of its “mundane”
dimension is meant to draw our attention to everyday practices, that is,
the practical engagement with objects (like, in their case, electric ve­
hicles, domestic smart energy technologies and solar panels). This is, in
other words, an objected-oriented approach that builds on Marres' idea
that “[s]imple mundane practices, such as turning off the light, driving
an electric car, or doing laundry, might become ‘a way of engaging with
and acting upon the environment’ (Marres in [30], p. 289).
This object-oriented approach is well-equipped to address a funda­
mental process that was left unclear in Devine-Wright's original account:
how involvement with “close to home” renewable technology could
cause people's affective, perceptive and behavioural shifts. Powered by
their new analytical resource, Ryghaug and her colleagues do show how
in various ways the devices or objects present occasions to develop new
1
A Virtual Power Plant is achieved through control over a geographically
circumscribed, but distributed set of assets of electricity production and con­
sumption, like PV panels, (household or community) batteries, as well as staple
household devices, like boilers, heat pumps or tumble dryers. When con­
sumption from the grid, or supply to the grid, can be coordinated (synchro­
nized) across all these assets, simultaneously, they act as a kind of power plant.
Control and coordination can be done through direct, remote control of the
assets or with the help of building occupants, who might make changes to their
device use/consumption.
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Energy Research & Social Science 102 (2023) 103165
awareness, knowledge and practices. Tesla owners had to engage with
the public controversy over subsidies for what was perceived by some as
conspicuous consumption. In so doing the owners educated themselves
about environmental challenges for the transport sector in particular,
and by extension, for the energy sector. Some of them even became
active supporters of local transition projects. People with smart energy
technology at the home reported having become more aware of energy –
as the ‘thing’ powering their house as well as an issue of societal
concern. Where possible, they shifted their energy consumption pat­
terns, in line with more sustainable use of the electricity grid. Finally,
more speculatively, the authors argue that once energy consumers
become ‘prosumers’ through their acquisition of PV, energy itself can
acquire different meaning (something of a local common pool resource)
and that it can push some to revise their energy consumption practices
(like shifting energy intensive activities to when the sun shines). Like
EVs, PV panels are publicly visible objects and as such can elicit dis­
cussion with others, whether about their value or as object of joint co­
ordination, if they become part of a community project [30].
This valuable analytical lens thus fleshes out Devine-Wright's early
ideas about energy citizenship in relation to technologies: as people get
more practically involved with (the) energy (system) – through key
devices and technological objects – they can take up new – and positive –
stances towards energy. People are relating to “political matters of
concern” ([30], p. 285) through mundane activities (through which they
are becoming more aware about these matters in the first place). In other
words, Ryghaug et al. develop an understanding of how people's
engagement with energy-related technologies derive their meaning from
being able to ‘act upon the world’, take responsibility for it, and thus be
part of something larger.
Table 1
Quadrant of material participation in the energy system.
Unilateral
Bilateral
Individual
Technologies: Solar, smart
meter, in-home displays
Generating energy for own
household and monitoring
household energy flows
Participation in energy system
via FIT/net metering
Collective
Technologies: Solar, wind
Generating and providing energy
to local communities (and/or
grid)
Participation in management,
ownership and/or operation of
the installation and in decisionmaking on (financial) returns
Participation in energy system
via FIT/net metering/other
policies for collectives
Technologies: Solar, smart meter,
smart household appliances,
batteries
Generating energy and
monitoring for own household
and grid, providing flexibility to
grid
Participation in demand response
markets
Technologies: Solar, smart meter,
smart household appliances,
batteries, platform technologies
Generating energy and
monitoring for own households
and grid, providing flexibility,
energy trading
Participation in demand response
markets; local and national
energy trading markets
(feed-in tariff). We refer to this as the unilateral quadrants in the matrix
below. Individual consumers and prosumers can also participate in the
management or governance of the energy system through newly
designed smart grid markets, like demand response. We call this
participation in energy system governance because here individual
households contribute to the stability of the grid. This is participation on
the bilateral side, because with smart grid markets a dynamic two-way
relation between households and the energy system is constructed, in
which households do not just generate energy, but also become
responsive to the needs of the grid. While this co-manager role [40,51]
may result in positive engagement with energy, critical questions have
been posed about the unequal capacities and resources of different
people to take up this role [26,38].
With the advent of the (community) energy platform, people can
enter energy markets as collectives [16,24] in diverse ways. It is a col­
lective form of participation, because all the resources from the com­
munity are pooled by an aggregator, which in the context of energy
means that energy production, storage and consumption across
participating households are assessed as a whole, and their use and
impact directed according to set objectives. One application of this
technology is when the aggregator steers storage devices and sometimes
(people's use of) household appliances to trade energy on behalf of the
collective, while other applications include assistance in grid congestion
management or maximising direct absorption of local PV electricity
through demand-side management [19]. In a community energy plat­
form the user thus becomes a participant in regulating the safe ‘coop­
eration’ of renewable assets with the rest of the electricity grid, so as to
maintain grid stability. Practically, it means participants becoming
‘responsive’ to the needs of the grid. Now, because trading and demand
response are (almost always) organised through energy (wholesale)
markets, this kind of energy stewardship works by getting remunerated
in exchange for being flexibly responsive [19]. This thus fills up the
fourth slot in the quadrant of material participation.
To analyse how platforms afford participation in the energy transi­
tion, we follow Ryghaug and colleagues, and conceptualise energy
citizenship as emerging from everyday mundane engagements with
technologies. These everyday interactions with technologies then open
up ways for people to engage in energy issues via processes of aware­
ness, knowledge and practices. On the surface, one might expect energy
platforms to be yet another opportunity for positive energy citizenship
to grow out of new close-to-home encounters with (renewable) energy.
We note two grounds for doubt however: Firstly, the inherent
complexity of grid management makes this into a qualitatively different
encounter than the material engagements with renewable energy in the
2.1. The platformisation of energy citizenship
Meanwhile, renewable energy is changing the grid profoundly. De­
centralisation of energy brings about complexities in the energy system
that do not only offer opportunities for (positive) engagement, but can
also frustrate such engagement. Ryghaug and her colleagues acknowl­
edge as much at one moment, when they mention that new technologies
can cause friction and new business models in the sector might introduce
new complications ([30], p. 296f.). And indeed, users' experience with
various ‘smart grid’ solutions has been less positive or at least more
ambiguous [10,13,25,36]. These solutions are often in some way
problematic: people experience them as incursions on daily routines, as
constraints on agency, rather than as opening up a new field for
meaningful engagement.
The advent of energy platforms may bring about similar tensions and
ambiguities. Energy platforms make use of smart grid technology and
create new energy collectives. More specifically, as outlined by Klop­
penburg and Boekelo ([15], p. 69), energy platforms “make use of a
digital environment […] to facilitate transactions between (small scale)
energy producers and consumers”. One can distinguish between
different kinds of platforms according to whether they merely record
energy flows or intervene in them, whether they are primarily geared
towards connecting small-scale energy assets or aimed at (financing) the
development of new ones, and the degree to which they algorithmically
take over from the user (or asset owner). In this paper we focus on the
kind that intervenes in the flow of energy, or what is called “community
platforms” [15].
These community platforms in particular offer the new possibility of
collective participation. If one were to imagine a quadrant of material
participation, up until recently there were three slots open in this
quadrant (see Table 1). People could get involved in energy generation as
individuals (prosumers with their solar panels) and as collectives (co­
operatives buying into or owning solar and wind installations). In terms
of participation, this was fairly straightforward: people hook up their
panels or wind turbines to the grid, consume the energy themselves, and
feed the excess energy into the grid in exchange for a monetary reward
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Energy Research & Social Science 102 (2023) 103165
unilateral column above. Secondly, so far, platform technologies that
operationalise this market-as-governance have been developed by util­
ities and power companies. It is an open question whether the latter
actors have managed to design these technologies such that they also
sync well with collectives' desires for meaningful contribution to the
state of the world. We suggest that participation in energy platforms
does not necessarily result in active and positive engagement with en­
ergy because platforms introduce new uncertainties and complexities in
the relationship between people and energy systems. Our entry point
into understanding these complexities are the experiences of house­
holders who volunteered to test out an energy platform in Amsterdam.
the participants. At this moment in the project, the participants' batteries
were connected through an ICT control module and the pooled energy
was used for trading energy on the national energy market. The first
workshop (held in June 2018) involved participants only and consisted
of gamified discussions about what values should undergird a VPP and
how that could be operationalised into an actual VPP design. In the
second workshop (November 2018) the project leadership was present
too and here we organised debates around a number of statements about
what a VPP should accomplish, provide, or enable members to do. These
statements were based on the earlier workshop as well as the interviews.
By opening up such questions for active deliberation, we invited the
participants to reflect and discuss issues of energy platform ownership,
operation and management, as well as wider energy system governance.
The workshop thereby enabled us to examine this new energy collective
as an emerging public: how the participants as members of this new
energy collective understood and discursively positioned themselves visa-vis the project leaders and the energy transition more broadly. The
combination of these two main sources of data – interviews about daily
interactions with energy technologies and the workshops to engage
people in a broader public consultation – thus provide a unique oppor­
tunity to gain insights into how energy platforms affect existing enact­
ments of energy citizenship and enable or frustrate new enactments.
The interviews and the first workshop were recorded and tran­
scribed. We analysed the transcripts thematically by focusing on the
three dimensions of mundane citizenship: awareness, knowledge, and
practices. In our analysis, we approached people's experiences with
renewable technologies as a trajectory of energy citizenship, which we
charted starting from the acquisition of PV panels to the current
participation in the Virtual Power Plant project. Below, we first examine
how interactions with PV panels shaped awareness, knowledge, and
practice that resulted in a form of energy citizenship that is centred
around the home as a site for individual action and responsibility. Then
we look into the expectations that people had about how their partici­
pation in the VPP would affect their agency and responsibility with
regards to energy issues. Next, we look at how the pilot introduced two
new material devices in the household: a battery and an accompanying
digital interface, and how these devices affected the established prac­
tices, knowledge, and awareness. In the final empirical section we report
on people's experiences in participating in the VPP. Here we base our
findings on the workshop that took place in year two, when the VPP was
operational. The key aim is to analyse this trajectory of mundane energy
citizenship in terms of shifts in awareness, knowledge and practices, and
how people experienced diminishing or expanding agency and re­
sponsibility with regards to energy issues.
3. Research methods
As mentioned, our observations stem from a pilot project for a Vir­
tual Power Plant in a suburb of Amsterdam. The project was initiated by
a consortium consisting of a grid operator, a green energy supplier and
an energy platform provider. For the project, which ran between March
2016 to February 2019, 48 homes with rooftop photovoltaic solar cells
(PV panels) were outfitted with a 5 kW battery, free of charge. Project
partners then sourced and developed the VPP software that could pool
the participants' renewable energy resources (PV panels and batteries),
turning the 48 households into a virtual collective that could experiment
with new forms of energy exchange, including providing grid balancing
services and trading energy on energy markets. The aim of the project
was to test and get insight into the impact of virtual power plants on the
energy grid and the possibilities to use VPPs to manage net congestion.
An additional aim was to see if householders would be interested in
engaging in a VPP, and more specifically how they would experience
participating in electricity and flexibility trading.
The project was implemented in a neighbourhood in Amsterdam
where grid congestion was a problem already. In this neighbourhood,
private homeowners who had already installed solar panels were invited
to participate. The presence of solar panels was a requirement because
the self-generated electricity would be used for trading. The home bat­
tery came in to store that energy in order to trade it at favourable mo­
ments. The promise was that any profit earned by trading energy would
be shared with the participating households, but any additional costs
would be borne by the energy provider. At the end, people would have
the choice to keep the battery or to return it to the consortium. People
were invited to sign up for the project via ads in a local newspaper as
well as direct mailings. Two information meetings were held in the
neighbourhood. This resulted in about 50 people to apply, some of who
could not be integrated, because their homes could not accommodate
the battery. A survey among the first 25 households to enrol in the
project showed that the vast majority of respondents (one per house­
hold) was highly educated, working as professionals (with a few re­
tirees), ranging from lower middle class (€2000–€2500/m) to upper
(middle) class (more than €5000/m net income). Average household
size was 2.7, mean size was 2. The geographical area of recruitment
included all households connected to an electricity substation, which
meant that the households that signed up did not know each other yet.
Our role as social scientists in the project was to examine the expe­
riences of the householders in the project. During the two-year period in
which the VPP project was actively implemented, we engaged with the
participants at different moments. In the early phase of the project, after
the aforementioned preliminary survey, we conducted 19 interviews
with participants who had just entered the project. At this point, most of
them had already had their batteries (recently) installed in their homes,
but the batteries were still in passive domestic consumption mode. Our
interviews with the participants served, firstly, to take down their en­
ergy biographies – usually starting with the moment they got their PV
panels up until the present moment. The second goal of the interview
was to understand their motivations to join the pilot and to talk about
their early experiences with the installation and use of the battery.
In the second year of the project, we organized two workshops with
4. A trajectory of energy citizenship: from solar to platform
4.1. Engaging with PV panels: awareness, knowledge, and action at home
As noted by other scholars [11,37,38,50], and reiterated by pilot
project participants, the installation of solar panels triggers new
behaviour. People start checking their ‘production’ and often they will
also start reconsidering how they consume energy. As one of the par­
ticipants explained this: “What I liked was seeing what you yourself perceive
in terms of sunshine and what that would mean in terms of PV production”.
People learn to read the weather in terms of energy potential and thus
reshape their perception of the world. We come back to this wellestablished point in order to emphasize that this new behaviour trig­
gers a new perception of the (physical and social) world. In fact, we
argue, getting solar panels triggers a process through which people
mould their subjectivity as energy citizens. For such a change in
perception is about more than just the weather. People also start
developing a feel for how much energy runs through the household,
particularly when they have smart energy monitors that show real-time
energy production and consumption data. The PV panels and smart
energy monitors have given them a new resource in the calibration of
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Energy Research & Social Science 102 (2023) 103165
their behaviour in terms of energy consumption.
Crucially, this practice of monitoring energy production is not a su­
perficial process – it is affective. Many people really enjoy watching how
much their PV panels yield. Moreover, because of the (initial) frequency
of monitoring and the positive valuation of PV-generated electricity, the
practice acquires something of a ritual. Ritual, as anthropologist have
pointed out, cements disposition: feelings about and views of the world
(e.g. [1,7,41]. Ritual, it seems, also cements people's connection to their
panels. In the following interview excerpt, one of the pilot participants
describes how solar energy makes her feel. Note how the first person
personal pronoun is – affectionately – used to refer to the solar panels,
signalling a degree of affective identification:
leaders thereby addressed them explicitly as energy citizens who
actively take responsibility for the system. The participating households
themselves, however, held varying expectations about what the project
would bring. Drawing on their existing energy practices and experiences
of citizenship, some people hoped that their participation in the VPP
project would make them even more aware of their energy consumption
and improve their energy consumption patterns at home. Others saw it
as a matter of preparing for the future, and to be ready to make the right
(financial and environmental) choices:
[A project like this] is an educational moment – in this sort of pilot
project, you deal with all the growing pains, but the advantage is that
you understand, like, ‘wait a minute, I need to think differently about
this’. (Philip)
I enjoy getting [energy] from my own panels. Like, I also have a
greenhouse, with my own cucumbers – I like those much better than
the ones I buy, you know. It's about that feeling. To a certain extent, I
think, it's about being independent: you don't have to acquire it from
outside –you're self-sustaining. I find it quite satisfying that you can
take care of it yourself. We're not really the kind of people who make
their own bread or whatever, you know. But I enjoy this: [to see] this
is how much I generated today – I can totally run my household on
that! (Margriet)
This includes the broader societal embedding and implications of this
kind of technology:
You get the chance to think about it and give your input […]. What's
interesting about this project, is that it has this social component. A
lot of people are going to think that they are all ‘green’ now [but in
fact, as he just explained, lithium batteries are far from ‘green’]. I like
that sort of discussion. That you start to think a little more, that it's
not just financial, but also about the environmental dimension and
about where you want to wind up in the long term. (Ernst)
Participants themselves felt like this change in perception changed
them as responsible persons and as members of society too (much like
the Tesla owners in the study of Ryghaug and colleagues). When people
talked about being aware or becoming conscious about energy, they
suggest, albeit mostly implicitly, that such awareness could lead to
behavioural change and better choices, whether by buying new energy
efficient devices, taking alternative modes of transportation more often,
or eating less meat. This language of (environmental) consciousness is
why we argue that the shift in perceptive ability enables people to mould
their subjectivity (as citizens). Becoming alive in this way to energy has
further implications for perceptions of the world: people became more
knowledgeable. A few mentioned actively keeping up on environmentrelated news, while others spoke of picking up on energy related is­
sues in the media, in a more organic way. One couple, in their early
retirement, recounted how they “discovered it was good” to wash when
the sun shines and that they found out it makes sense to replace your big
household appliances after 7 to 8 years. And so they did.
All of this shows that as people develop new domestic energy prac­
tices of monitoring around domestic PV generation, they become
conscious about energy and actively seek out or become more attuned to
relevant information, which in turns makes them ‘more aware’ of the
climate problem, and all its implications for policy and their daily life.
The type of energy citizenship that emerges here is one in which people
take responsibility over their own domestic domain: by investing in solar
energy, in reducing energy consumption, and perhaps through some
other ‘responsible’ choices or behaviours, like changing food habits or
mobility routines. People talk about this trajectory positively, as one of
expanding agency and positive feedback. PV, in other words, is really a
quite ‘successful’ technology – panels work, on the whole, as advertised,
and they open up new, meaningful experiences and a path for engage­
ment for many of their owners. For the participants in the VPP project,
the experience also opened them up for new knowledge and made them
sensitive to the pitch that the VPP demonstration project leaders slid
through their letter boxes: an invitation to be part of the future of the
energy grid.
These are examples of how people imagined their participation in
terms of further awareness and expanding agency: learning and making
up their own minds about new questions and issues. But this was
certainly not the only role that people conceived of for themselves (and
by implication, for other parties):
Secretly, me and my wife, we talked about this, after we registered
for the project, maybe with a windmill in the mix, we could sever
[‘hack’] the cable to our energy provider - I like that idea a lot, the
idea of self-sufficiency. […] I can just picture it - with a big axe,
awesome! [Laughs] Nice.
(Dennis)
Here the concept of the Virtual Power Plant triggered fantasies about
a new relationship to energy in the local neighbourhood: that of energy
autonomy.
Becoming part of a virtual energy collective was something people
were interested in, but many found it difficult to imagine what it could
look like in practice. Several people thought it was “cool”, or “a lot of fun”
that individual (power) capacity would be bundled, and at a later stage
possibly even shared in the collective. The idea of doing things ‘together’
thus resonated with some participants, but what such a ‘together’ would
have to look like was still quite unclear at the moment of the interviews.
The same actually went for collective independence or self-sufficiency.
It's “an interesting idea that you can provide in your own energy as a small
group”, as one woman put it. While this idea remained mostly abstract,
the prospect of relating differently to energy was an attractive one. As
she explained further: “You read about it in the newspaper every day, we
can't go on like we've always done. So if someone offers you an alternative,
you should get on board”. This shows that people expected further posi­
tive engagements with energy through developing new knowledge,
further awareness, and collective practices in the VPP.
4.3. Engaging with batteries and interfaces: frustrations and uncertainty
in participation in the Virtual Power Plant
4.2. Energy citizenship in the Virtual Power Plant: expectations of further
positive engagements with energy
Participation in the VPP project meant that residents got a home
battery installed in their household. For some people, the battery turned
out to provide another device to calibrate their perceptions of energy,
with people going into guessing games (with themselves) about whether
the wintry sunlight would be able to fill up the battery that day. For
others, the battery as an energy storage device demonstrated the value
of a kWh:
In the process of recruiting participants for the VPP pilot project, the
project leaders emphasised the new possibilities for households to
contribute to the energy transition. By joining the VPP, people would
collectively help address the problem of matching demand and supply of
energy in a decarbonising and decentralising energy system. The project
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It's actually kind of funny, if you look at this process of becoming
more conscious, you really become quite aware of what it means to
generate power, how much a kWh is, and what that means for how
much you can use. But if you look at your basic plug-in hybrid, with 8
kW and it can go for 30 km or whatever, so the values are finally
starting to get through to you. It's a really a process of becoming more
conscious. (Philip)
steering of the batteries would offer new opportunities for participation
in the (transition towards a cleaner) energy system. In the next section,
we move to the workshop that we organised in the second year of the
project, when the batteries had been connected and the pooled energy
could be used for different purposes. In this workshop the participants
met each other for the first time to discuss different values, roles and
responsibilities with regards to grid balancing, trading, and selfconsumption. How did people respond to the idea to engage in these
collective practices, and to the new modes of citizenship that the plat­
form could offer?
The battery came with its own interface, showing production, con­
sumption and storage of energy. However, as people started using this
interface, many of them felt a little frustrated by what they encountered.
The technically inclined participants who dove deep into the different
graphs found the information inconsistent with what they thought was
happening or ought to be happening in their household. In part, the
problems they were running into were due to the experimental nature of
the pilot, in which the batteries became a persistent bottleneck for the
project leaders: the batteries experienced significant efficiency losses
and turned out to be inaccessible to remote read-outs. However, it wasn't
solely operational and logistical issues that constituted problems for
participants. The fact itself that the battery was interjected into the
energy household made things in themselves confusing. For the
following quote, a couple in their late fifties were talking about how the
battery disturbed their routine practices of monitoring the performance
of their solar panels:
4.4. Deliberating mundane energy citizenship in the future grid
As we have seen, for many people, awareness of the problem of
climate change and the necessity to transition away from fossil fuel had
grown over the years, and most saw their engagement in the VPP project
as a next step in a trajectory of becoming more sustainable and selfsufficient as a household. Their experiences with the fluctuating avail­
ability of self-generated green energy had also made them aware of new
issues such as the challenges of decentralised renewable energy pro­
duction and (further future) electrification for the grid. In the workshop
one of the participants reflected on this:
If things continue like this, with decentralized energy generation,
and we all want to drive electric cars, well, then all these houses need
3 × 80 Volt, because you don't get there with a simple socket on the
wall. So all cables will need to be replaced. And think about it: in a
city like Amsterdam, with all the canals, that's simply impossible!
Until this installation [of the battery], things were very simple. The
digital meter indicated how much Watt you're generating every hour,
and by the amount you fed back into the grid, you can deduce the
solar yield. […] I cannot see that anymore, because it's going into the
battery. (Peter)
The idea that a VPP could facilitate the integration of renewables in
the grid was familiar to many of the participants, and during the
workshop a discussion revolved around the role of batteries and VPPs in
addressing systemic issues:
If we don't actually consume the energy from the panels, it goes into
the battery, which means you are not feeding into the grid, which
means you can't track things through the meter. So I am very curious
how all of this is going to go. (Saskia)
P1: Right now the grid is congested, but those batteries will help to
relieve that because we store [the energy] ourselves.
P2: But if we all have those batteries, and because of those batteries
the grid will get congested [when they charge from or discharge to
the grid at the same time], and then the hospital won't have power…
More people were puzzled about a more elementary question too:
how can the battery interface give me any accurate information about
what is happening in my household, if the energy company and VPP
aggregator take control over my battery? Such questions relate to the
fundamental architecture of the VPP: a battery is inserted into the
household, one whose state of charge doesn't depend only on things that
go on within the household. Then there was the interface itself. It was
not created with ordinary consumers in mind (probably more with
system administrators), and so the visualizations of those dynamic de­
velopments were often experienced as confounding. As one of the par­
ticipants put it: “I've tried to make some headway, but then, I'm like,
whatever, I already don't get it any more. But I know it can be very simple! It
has to be simple - that you can see it”. The participants wanted to under­
stand, but felt frustrated in this desire. “It's very important to know what
you're doing”, as another person underscored.
Other studies too have shown how using a home battery can cause
uncertainty (what is the battery doing, why is it making noise?), and a
sense of disempowerment with regards to the workings of the battery
[27,35]. Yet, while previous research understood such frustrations
about the battery as the result of failed interactions with a material
device, here we understand them as stemming from the disruption of an
established mode of energy citizenship. In the VPP project, people's
agency, in the sense of their capacity to reflect on and act with regards to
their domestic energy production and consumption, diminished. People
could no longer monitor if and how their everyday practices contributed
to their broader goals (e.g. of being sustainable). Due to the remote
control over the battery they also lost their grip on how the energy flows
ran between the household and the grid. In other words, the new
practice of storing energy disrupted established practices of monitoring
and managing energy flows in the household that were the foundation of
people's sense of energy citizenship. Was something else going to make
up for this? The project's promise was that the remote and collective
This small exchange shows that people become aware of the com­
plexities of grid management, but that they are uncertain about the ef­
fects of their storage practices on redirecting energy flows. The
uncertainty here was not just related to the exact systemic effects of
energy storage, but more importantly, whether through their partici­
pation in a VPP people would be contributing to a good cause. When
they discussed the possibility of joining an energy platform aimed at
providing grid balancing services, people also perceived that aim in light
of the larger ‘project’ they cared most about: becoming more
sustainable:
P1: Are we enhancing sustainability when we're trying to improve
the stability and affordability of the grid? Are we making things more
sustainable? Or…?
P2:No, you're not making things more sustainable that way.
P3: but you NEED that [a stable grid] to make that development, that
shift towards fossil-free!
All this suggests that with this new awareness of energy system issues
also come new uncertainties about people's own role and agency
through the energy platform. The earlier ‘simple’ practices of generating
and managing energy at household level through which energy citi­
zenship was enacted are supplemented with collective energy practices
that make people aware of, and reflect on, energy system issues. This
introduces complexities to the trajectory of becoming more environ­
mentally aware: it is no longer so clear what it means to ‘be green’.
The new collective practices that the VPP made possible – grid
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balancing, energy trading, collective self-consumption – thus also
sparked a discussion among the participants about their own role and
about the allocation of responsibility. Who is in a position to act? Which
forces should be rallied in order to foster energy transitions? What ties to
be established? Some people were very enthusiastic about contributing
to grid balancing, and one workshop participant argued that: ‘Look, we
ourselves do not control getting rid of our dependence on fossil fuels; that is
much more up to companies. Large companies, that is where the problem lies.
I believe we are much better off if we, together, ensure that there is a stable
energy grid.’ In this quote, grid stability is perceived as one of the issues
where the collective action of citizens is a form of agency that creates
positive impact. This idea that people could take responsibility for the
stability of the grid, however, did not appeal to everyone. In the same
discussion, someone else distrusted the motivations of other parties to
involve citizens in this:
derailment of the journey of becoming more sustainable that people had
embarked on. The material participation that platforms offer thus on the
one hand provides occasion for developing further awareness of the
complexities of a changing energy system and for collective energy
practices to create experiences of positive engagement with energy. On
the other hand, the bundling and remote steering of energy practices
complicates notions of responsibility and agency, as it makes it more
difficult for people to oversee the effects of their actions.
5. Discussion
What do energy platforms offer in terms of collective participation in
the energy transition? Our findings show that everyday energy citizen­
ship in the sense of ‘doing good with your energy’ becomes complex
with the emergence of collectivising technologies such as Virtual Power
Plants. Being an energy citizen now goes beyond ‘having your own
house in order’, and requires people to reflect on their position in
relation to new issues such as grid balance, and the ‘greenness’ of
various energy markets. In doing so, they also need to reflect on their
own agency vis-a-vis the collective agency that results from the bundling
of energy practices of all households participating in the platform, and
vis-a-vis the power and motivations of providers who offer and control
such new ‘collectivising material devices’. For the households in our
research this was a frustrating endeavour. The new collective actions
complicated the participants' sense of agency with regards to energy in
the situated contexts of the home, because people were not sure if the
goals of their individual ‘project’ and those of the platform were aligned.
People's concept of agency was further unsettled because the platform
worked ‘in the background’ and automated collective actions and
decision-making without much feedback to users. Third, interacting
with the VPP platform also meant that people needed to (re-)consider
their ideas and practices of ‘making a positive impact’ with energy in
relation to the rationalities of grid and electricity markets. The VPP
made people responsible for issues that previously lay outside of their
direct sphere of influence (e.g. grid balance, local self-sufficiency).
While some respondents experienced this as an opportunity to take on
an extended responsibility, others questioned or even resisted the po­
sition assigned to them by the platform. Hence, because the households
in our research lacked insight and feedback on real time production and
consumption data of the collective, and how this impacted energy flows
in their own household, this created a (perceived) tension between
acting for the sake of the energy system and working towards one's own
sustainability project. This poses a serious design issue, because if
greening the grid will depend on citizen participation to ensure its sta­
bility, energy platforms need to make clear what their value proposition
is.
This becomes even more important when we consider other trajec­
tories than that of individual PV owners who at some point may decide
to join a platform-based collective. Energy cooperatives, for example,
are collectives that predate the platform collective. Their active
involvement with energy generation already goes beyond “participation
through using domestic devices” and extends to ownership, manage­
ment and operation of energy assets and infrastructure [44,48,49]. This
may include collective decision-making over the purchase of assets such
as turbines or solar panels, which itself entails public deliberation over
the future of common or collective resources [2]. In other words, energy
cooperatives have already construed a sense of who they are, and what
they want to accomplish collectively. Energy platforms such as VPPs can
be attractive for cooperatives, because this technology can enable them
to exchange energy via local energy markets and achieve goals such as
local self-sufficiency [46]. Taken energy cooperatives' existing trajectory
of collective energy citizenship, we can expect that they want to have a
say not just in the specific way energy platforms are operated for the
sake of the energy system, but may also want to operate and even own
such platforms themselves. If energy platforms are to play a supporting
role in the next phase of the energy transition, the ‘match’ between
The grid belongs to the grid operator, and the grid operator wants to
run it as economically as possible. So what do they want? Postponing
investments! We help them to make their cables last longer, and that
means they can postpone an investment of billions?! I absolutely
don't pity them!
Likely because of their historical trajectory as energy citizens who
learned to optimise their household energy consumption, the idea of an
energy platform that aimed at CO2 reduction (at neighbourhood or even
just household level) resonated a lot better with the participants. As one
of the participants argued about her role in such a VPP:
It's a collective endeavour, and it supports a good cause. The second
argument is that it's close to myself, to what I do as a person to reduce
that CO2 footprint of myself and my family. That's what I can have an
impact on.
In this line of reasoning, the abstract issue of climate change is made
tangible and translated back into the domestic or personal framework of
the CO2 footprint. The VPP then would link domestic practices and en­
ergy citizenship in a similar way as the solar panels did, but now in a
collective sense. Yet, there was more to this desire to ‘keep matters in
your own hands’. The workshop participants showed a general scepti­
cism about energy companies and grid operators making money with
new ‘services’ such as grid balancing or trading energy on the national
energy market. As one participant said:
For all we know the fast guys will run with this and start speculating,
that's what they all do nowadays! […] There's always people who
will think ‘how we can make money out of this, how to best make
money from someone's green identity?’
This person was not alone in his fear that a VPP could mean a
‘marketisation’ of their energy citizenship:
Look, my goal, myself, I want to – with my house, with my battery –
to be energy neutral. I don't want other parties to earn millions from
my battery.
This shows that the role of the energy citizen that most people
conceived for themselves is still very much based on taking re­
sponsibility for their domestic domain, through practices that are
focused on household goals, like being “energy neutral”. Another
participant pictured a horror scenario in which he would come home in
the evening to find out that “the provider has decided to drain the battery
completely” in order to trade the energy, so he would lose what he had
saved during the day. These conceptions of energy platform providers
whose commercial logics go against or frustrate people's positive en­
gagements with energy also brings up a more fundamental difference in
the perception of what energy is. As we have seen earlier, most people
viewed energy as a resource they grow, manage, and harvest in their
domestic sphere. VPP models that aim at grid balancing and trading,
however, bring a different conceptualisation of energy: as a commodity
that is subject to market logics. Such other logics can be experienced as a
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cooperatives' goals and energy platform rationalities needs better
alignment [20]. This requires increased transparency and feedback
about the social, economic, and environmental benefits and trade-offs of
different goals of platforms (local and national-level energy trading, grid
balancing).
Looking more broadly, the question comes up for whom energy
platforms create new possibilities to participate in the energy transition.
While the literature around new platforms and their business models is
growing [3,6,21,32,45], there is still little empirical analysis of who can
participate in them, and whether these models enable people to
participate in the energy system in a way that is meaningful to them
[34]. Thus, Silvast and Valkenburg [33] note that the literature on en­
ergy citizenship often does not pay much attention to the gender, age,
ethnicity, and socio-economic background of “energy citizens”. The
“energy citizen” that energy platforms target so far, and also the par­
ticipants in the pilot project we examined, are resourceful prosumers. In
reality, not everyone can afford to acquire solar panels and home bat­
teries, and not all households are equally flexible in adapting their en­
ergy consumption to the needs of the grid by time-shifting their domestic
practices [26,36,38]. The experiences of the respondents of our research
thus should not be generalised, but interpreted and contextualised in
light of their specific historical trajectory of citizenship, recognisable to
many resourceful prosumers, one which builds on their positive en­
gagements with energy through PV technologies.
At the same time, platform business models are quickly diversifying,
and new groups may be drawn into platform-based energy. For example,
some energy platforms provide assets such as solar panels and batteries
to households in return for (partial) access to and control over these
assets. Such platforms are often promoted as a means to reduce the
financial barriers for consumers to purchase and use devices such as
batteries and electric vehicles. In the future, people could also get
involved in platform energy when they relocate to a newly built
neighbourhood in which (flexibility) assets and energy management
systems are already installed in homes and the built environment. Based
on our ‘trajectory-based’ analysis of citizenship, we may expect these
developments to open up new forms of energy citizenship as well. The
existing energy citizenship literature does not look well-equipped to
accommodate these dynamics of citizenship. Many authors, in fact,
implicitly or explicitly, only qualify the pro-active and positive
engagement of the resourceful prosumer as “energy citizenship”. Only
when people take on responsibility are they ‘citizens’. But if citizenship
is a perception of an issue, a perspective on who is responsible for resolving
it, as well as the practices that express that perspective, then passiveness
can be as much an act of citizenship as active engagement. This position
can help clarify and answer the question raised by Wahlund and Palm
([47]: 10) about there being any space for “non-participation” in smart
energy-connected homes, or whether everything becomes ‘citizenship’.
In a hypothetical case of a smart energy-equipped new home, where
flexible responsiveness is automated, its new occupants might go
through their day oblivious to the enlistment of their house in governing
the energy grid. Such oblivion (‘non-participation’) is not a matter of
energy citizenship in our sense.2 However, as soon as they consult dis­
plays or apps and their awareness changes, they start relating to energy
as an issue – whether they stay ‘passive’ or change energy practices.’­
Passivity’ is therefore not necessarily a matter of non-participation.
Citizens may feel it's right to outsource responsibility for energy issues
to other actors such as aggregators, just as they might rebel against the
ways in which responsibilities are designed by a platform (as many of
our respondents did). Both are modes of participation. The benefit of
material participation theory here is clear: it helps us operationalise this
more agnostic approach to energy citizenship and uncover the diverse
modes and experiences of energy citizenship that can emerge in different
settings.
Questions about who participates in platforms and under what
conditions are not just a matter of research, but vital questions for a
democratic and just energy system. While the everyday, material
dimension of platform-based energy citizenship is taking shape as
platform technologies start to spread more widely, the possibilities for
citizens to influence this development and its direction so far seem
rather limited. An important reason for this is that many energy plat­
forms and their development offer practical engagement, but do not
offer (adequate) discursive space to enable collective discursive partic­
ipation and reflection. This brings us all the way back to the beginning of
this paper, to Devine-Wright's prediction that close involvement in the
(transition towards a renewable) energy system would foster the growth
of a new public. Based on our observations in the Amsterdam pilot, we
would tend to concur: people told us about how they were now paying
increased and different attention to energy in the media and conversa­
tions with family, neighbours and acquaintances. In addition, the
workshops we organized midway through the VPP pilot showed that
people were eager to exchange opinions and deliberate about the
contribution they (individually and collectively) would want to provide,
and how and why. But there is no sign that similar deliberative spaces
are being integrated into the deployment of next-generation platforms.
We want to pause for reflection here. The link between everyday
engagement and public stances was key to Devine-Wright's perspective.
We have used Marres' “material participation” as a lens to flesh out how
such a link might be established. For Marres [18], holding the connec­
tion between these two types and sites of participation – material and
domestic, discursive and public – is absolutely essential.3 People relate
to topics of (public concern) though everyday, material forms of
participation. That means they come to the table with already existing
commitments. However, these commitments and practices are often
overseen. The energy sector in particular has not outgrown its percep­
tion of people as economically rational agents. It undergirds many of
their models and simulations. As long as this is the premise upon which
people are approached, it leads to inappropriate terms of engagement
and unconstructive face-offs [18]. But when these material forms of
participation do become visible and legible, it opens up a different space
for dialogue and deliberation, meeting people where they're at.
It is therefore high time to open up that space for public deliberation
about the values that should undergird a future digitalised energy sys­
tem [23,43]. There are pressing questions with regards to the benefits
and risks of digitalised energy system, as well as the right and ability to
hold energy and political actors and their decisions to account. The need
for citizens and communities to deliberate about platform-based energy
will only grow, when EU legislation on the role of prosumers and energy
communities is transposed to national contexts. The revised EU Energy
Directives have called ‘energy communities’ into legal being and
allotted them the rights to generate, store, consume, and sell energy (cf.
[28]). Energy platforms can provide the aggregation services and user
interfaces that would enable this, but space needs to be made to discuss
values, roles and responsibilities between the community members and
the platform provider.
Based on our findings in the demonstration project, we can identify a
3
Note that Marres actually denotes both material and discursive practies as
“public participation”, in order to mark that they're two sides of the same coin.
Ryghaug et al. [30] follow this convention. While we appreciate the intention,
we have opted to maintain the symbolic distinction between domestic and
public, alongside the material and discursive, in order stay more in line with
conventional understanding of the term ‘public’ in particular. Therefore, we
have subsumed everyday material participation under the banner of citizenship
(rather than the public), in order to understand and explain that also through
domestic actions, people ‘act upon the world’ and contribute to something
bigger.
2
Though one may wonder about the political economy of energy citizenship
– what are the affordances for people to gain awareness about an issue and
subsequently to relate to it – practically, materially or through representation?
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number of key questions: What are the (economic, environmental) ef­
fects of the community's participation in different energy markets, and
what values should be prioritised? How to distribute the costs and
benefits of the new energy transactions within and beyond the virtual
community? What information should platforms provide to their users
about directions and provenance of energy flows? How should owner­
ship, control and use of material assets and platform infrastructure be
organised? Which parties should (not) have access to household energy
data, and for what purposes can this data be used? Participation in such
discussions and making up one's mind about these collective governance
issues goes beyond what is currently common for and expected from
citizens and communities. What new publics will rise up and how this
will impact energy democracy dimensions of popular sovereignty,
participatory governance and civic ownership [14,39] is an important
subject for future studies.
and how seek to regain a sense of control. It also recognises the new
complexities digitalisation raises for people's efforts to be green or so­
cially responsible, as well as the enthusiasm and confusion that arises
from engaging in technologically-mediated collective action.
Our empirical findings suggest that it is important to understand
people's participation in energy issues as part of a trajectory they are on.
The “energy citizen” is by no means fixed, but develops in a particular
context and through everyday interactions with technologies. ‘Accep­
tance’ of energy technology and ‘public engagement’ in transitions is
therefore also not a one-time thing. Not only does the technology keep
evolving (and thus remain in periodic need of re-evaluation), but people
accrue experience and information over time through their interactions
with technologies, according to which they also evolve their (dis)posi­
tion. For policymakers and project managers, this means that they have
to think about how to create meaningful engagement over longer pe­
riods of time, to create the conditions of possibility for people to develop
their viewpoint on new energy measures and the introduction of new
technologies. We also draw a design lesson from the experience of
research participants: when the scale at which people are enlisted to act
goes beyond the household, there need to be feedback mechanisms that
show the effects of their energy practices. As long as these mechanisms
are absent, there is a risk that new energy technologies frustrate rather
than promote people's engagement with and support for the energy
transition. From that frustration, disengagement rather than engage­
ment, may well follow ([4]: 676). Platform developers will need to
design explicitly for people to know that they are doing ‘their bit’ – that
quintessential scope of everyday material participation in energy issues,
so far.
6. Conclusion
Does closer involvement and interaction with local and distributed
energy provisioning lead to greater engagement with and support for the
energy transition? This is what much of the literature about energy
citizenship has presupposed or postulated for a long time. This article
intended to revisit this assumption by attending to the mechanisms
through which this process would have to work. With the help of the
material participation approach, we investigated how energy platforms
as technologies of material participation shape practices and experi­
ences of mundane energy citizenship. Our main contribution to the
literature on energy citizenship is to show the daily material interactions
through which people's citizenship emerges in relation to energy
platforms.
We found that the relationship between interaction with distributed
energy infrastructure and engagement with and support for the transi­
tion is not necessarily always positive. Participation in an energy plat­
form can trigger householders to reflect on what energy is and how their
self-generated energy can be used to support the energy transition. At
the same time, a peculiarity of the latest generation collective demand
response energy systems is that the platform draws the household into
the (management of) the energy grid, at the same time as it decentres the
household in a collective arrangement. This need not necessarily be a
source of problems per se, but in our case study, it caused friction.
People with experience with rooftop PV wanted to expand their sense of
citizenship through engagement with the energy platform. This new
system, however, disrupted pre-existing interactions and feedback
mechanisms, which had cemented people's sense of their role in, and
contribution to, the energy transition – without replacing it with an
adequate mechanism in return. It thus contracted their sense of agency
and responsibility.
What do these findings mean for the future of energy citizenship in a
digitalised, low-carbon energy system? We sketch out an answer to this
question both for research on energy citizenship, and for the practical
implications of mundane participation in the energy transition.
Some scholars argue that the digitalisation of the energy system is
driven by a neoliberal logic of anti-politics in which human agency is
reduced or removed from energy systems ([31], p. 2), and the space for
citizens to deliberate and challenge decision-making has been dimin­
ished [29]. This would mean that the potential for energy citizenship in
the future grid would be small. Yet, such critiques risk missing how
through everyday engagement with digital technologies, the energy
system can also become a site of political engagement in new ways. To
understand energy citizenship in a digitalising grid, we argue for further
empirical studies that examine how people interact with these tech­
nologies, how they handle the complexities of technologically mediated
and automated collective actions, and how it spurs their imagination of
alternatives. In other words, by focusing on everyday life, this
perspective seeks to understand how people deal with distributed
agency and responsibilities, when they feel frustrated or empowered,
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
Data availability
The authors do not have permission to share data.
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