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Energy systems need to become less carbon intensive under the current pressing conditions of climate change. Residential demand-side flexibility – shifting of household energy consumption, is an important part of this transition. Such changes are to be understood in the context of everyday, routinely performed practices. Regarding household labour as gendered, and building on recent practice-oriented perceptions of gender as a socially constructed element of everyday practices, the paper contributes to insights of how smart grid technologies shape, challenge (and are shaped and challenged by) the performance of everyday household labour. We uncover issues of coordination of household practices in relation to concentration of smart-grid related digital expertise amongst members of households in three European smart grid pilot sites (in the Netherlands, Italy and France). Informed by initial exploratory empirical work, we zoom in on gendered experiences of control, trust (in technological systems and technological system providers), and coping mechanisms in the analysis of interviews and/or focus groups held with residents at these three sites. We include emotional responses as evidence of lived experiences to better understand the diverse reactions of both men and women. We discuss the diverse situated experiences in relation to the coordination of household labour practices, addressing if and how patterns of expertise accumulation and concentration occur and how these relate to increases in new digital dependencies (or even lock-out situations, where household members can no longer control basic energy services in the home themselves). We conclude with a discussion on different ways and possibilities to arrive at more distributed or shared forms of housekeeping – to arrive at more gender-sensitive/inclusive and effective smart grid design

This deliverable presents a review of relevant EU and national policies that affect energy vulnerability in the seven participating countries. We take an analytical perspective combining the concepts of social resilience and environmental justice. This enables us to attend to the ways in which policies and interventions show a recognition of the specific needs of energy poor households (relating to their capabilities and available resources), while also addressing how these policies and interventions (potentially) have distributive impacts. The purpose of this report is to provide (together with a previous report on citizen views with regard to policy needs for energy poverty alleviation (Breukerset al.,2021) a more detailed starting position for subsequent work that will further explore innovative governance practices together with relevant policy actors in the participating countries.

This deliverable presents an analysis of the interviews conducted with citizens and stakeholder organisations in the seven focal countries, in order to identify expressed citizen experiences with institutional support and their experienced needs for support. The analysis shows that next to the policy needs that related to the structural causes of energy poverty that need to be addressed, several needs expressed relate to support provided by intermediary organisations. The findings point towards the importance of strengthening social resilience and how intermediary organisations are better positioned and equipped to do this than institutional actors. The analysis also reveals that various intermediaries (aim to) go beyond mere behavioural change interventions, in efforts to strengthen peoples’ capabilities to cope with energy poverty. These findings provide relevant points of departure for subsequent work in the EnergyMeasures project.

Afsluitende brochure van het RAAK-project Op naar beter, nul op de meter! Verschillende auteurs uit het werkveld hebben een bijdrage geleverd. Met een voorwoord van gedeputeerde Nienke Homan.

Storytelling as a research and collaboration tool is grounded in several social science disciplines, including Anthropology and Sociology. The storytelling methodology that SHAPE ENERGY will use is developed and coordinated by our project partner Duneworks, and will facilitate productive working in several SHAPE ENERGY activities and within our own communication approaches.\ud \ud This report details the guidelines for facilitators of the 18 SHAPE ENERGY multi-stakeholder workshops and the four Horizon 2020 sandpits with H2020/FP7 project partners. However, these guidelines are also designed to enable wider use by others aiming to facilitate interdisciplinary and/or multi-stakeholder collaboration.

It is becoming increasingly clear that we need an integrated approach to understanding and encouraging transitions towards a sustainable energy system. Current overall unsustainable ‘practices’ are locked into cultural, material, institutional and infrastructural settings. This limits the scope for individual choice and action. Even when actions are taken on individual or project level, they often remain stand-alone niche experiments and little further diffusion takes place. This paper addresses this problem by investigating how new more sustainable practices in the field of energy demand at the micro level can become mainstream and how energy demand side management projects can encourage this. We first discuss how a multilevel systems approach and practice theory may be fruitfully combined to address the problem of mainstreaming. Second, we analyse four empirical cases of energy demand side management. We explore efforts at diffusing these sustainable energy practices, the encountered challenges, employed solutions and achieved outcomes with the goal of learning about opportunities to mainstream best practices in the field of energy demand. The analysis reveals that the case that involved the most radical innovation faced the highest resistance to mainstreaming from the incumbent system. The more incremental initiatives were more successful at diffusing, but had rather modest outcomes in terms of environmental and efficiency gains. An important finding is that in order to shift everyday practices to a more sustainable direction, an understanding of possibilities to trigger changes in social norms is needed. When these changes are quite invasive, more time for negotiation and discussion might be needed before they become regarded as legitimate. Furthermore, connecting supply and demand (instead of merely addressing the demand side) can be crucial in mainstreaming sustainable energy practices. Although lessons learned from the cases do not offer clear-cut ‘do’s and don’ts’ for future efforts, they do highlight important issues for mainstreaming sustainable practices. These issues can sometimes be addressed within the scope of a single energy demand side project, but often policy has an important facilitating role to play in making sustainable energy practices legitimate and mainstream.