Is demand side response a woman's work? Domestic labour and electricity shifting in low income homes in the United Kingdom

Abstract

This paper discusses a utility-led research project which piloted smart meters and DSR products (a time of use tariff and a critical peak rebate scheme) with 500 low income households in London. As households set about the task of adjusting their electricity use in response to shifting prompts, they revealed the importance of managing domestic labour to generate value from DSR products and the role of women in carrying this out. The experience is at odds with the smart future more typically imagined in which chore-doing is handed over to feminized AI assistants who orchestrate IoT appliances to create comfort and capture value. Strengers has cautioned against constructing a smart future to serve 'Resource Man'. Drawing on trial participants' experiences, the paper develops the concept of 'Flexibility Woman' in order to bring the realities of domestic labour more sharply into focus. The paper argues that chore-doing needs to become a narrative in the smart future to understand the burdens and opportunities for 'Flexibility Woman' to create value from her labour. It suggests that women unable to afford a surrogate AI wife may find themselves becoming 'Flexibility Woman' or else excluded from accessing the cheaper, greener electricity of the future. It also suggests that ignoring gender risks undermining the impacts that policy makers and network operators hope to achieve through DSR.The paper makes a unique contribution to our understanding of how DSR relates to gender roles and what the implications are for the effectiveness and inclusivity of flexibility products.

Care, Gender, and Change in the Study of Sustainable Consumption: A Critical Review of the Literature

“…For instance, participative approaches to energy consumption have demonstrated that it is possible to voluntarily re-craft practices by acting on their constituting elements, such as social norms or skills (Sahakian et al, 2021). However, changing practices involves work which, in the household arena, risks falling disproportionately on women's shoulders (Godin et al, 2020;Johnson, 2020). This concern, and the impact it can have on successfully implementing more sustainable consumption practices and lifestyles, is at the core of this paper.…”

“…In a study of voluntary downshifting among Australian households, Lane et al (2020) noted that the reduction in both paid working hours and consumption was most often motivated not by sustainability, but by the necessities of care giving, which was almost always accomplished by women, pleading for the necessity of taking gender and care into account in the discussions around reducing consumption. Similarly, Johnson (2020) demonstrates the importance of chore-doing for energy systems transition and its quasi-absence from both public policy and scholarship, along with the absence of gender. She argues that it is a major blind spots which risks undermining efforts to reduce household energy consumption.…”

“…The literature on sustainable consumption has, for a large part, proved ill-equipped in tackling inequalities and power relationships within and outside the home, a weakness we seek to address by throwing light on the centrality of care in household consumption practices. That being said, questions of gender, inequalities and care in sustainable consumption have been gaining momentum in the last year or so, with several publications on this topic coming out in a short time span, among them the work of Fathallah and Pyakurel (2020), Hargreaves and Middlemiss (2020), Johnson (2020), Lane et al (2020), Mechlenborg and Gram-Hanssen (2020), or Gram-Hanssen (2021).…”

Social license to automate: A critical review of emerging approaches to electricity demand management

“…Automation technologies are indeed a component of flexibility capital -and tied in part to economic characteristics -given that only some households have the means to purchase smart appliances and HEMS, for example, to make their energy use flexible [68]. One consequence of this is captured in the idea of 'flexibility woman' who takes on the burden of providing flexibility if the household is unable to afford smart home equipment [69,70]. This means that automated DSM programs must be tailored to accommodate the different capacities of households to participate, as well as the varying scope for flexibility associated with different energy practices.…”

Identifying Challenges in Engaging Users to Increase Self-Consumption of Electricity in Microgrids

“…Such findings, alongside an absence of any consensus regarding whether and to what extent financial Demand response programs and the flexibility of household electricity consumption have been studied from a range of perspectives. Previous demand response studies have for example investigated the relation between flexibility and gender [22,23], households with children [24,25], flexibility capital [26], social practices [27], temporality of everyday life [28], user typology [29] and non-self-selected prosumers [30]. A systematic review of consumer engagement among households for demand responsibility can be found in [31].…”