MAKING THE SMART CITIZEN
MAKING THE SMART CITIZEN
An investigation into the efforts to shape
Energy Citizenship in a Smart Grid context
Making The Smart Citizen
MAKING THE SMART CITIZEN
An investigation into the efforts to shape
Energy Citizenship in a Smart Grid context
Bachelor Thesis
16 juni 2019
D.M. Molleman
Student nummer: 11275820
Faculteit Sociale Geografie en Planologie
Universiteit van Amsterdam
Preface
Ever since the discovery of the effect of greenhouse gasses on the environment, there have been experiments seeking a sustainable answer to society’s ever-increasing needs. There was a lot to gain in the energy sector. Initially came renewable energy solutions such as solar panels, windmills and hydropower plants. The issue with these renewable energy sources was that there was a huge amount of energy loss when the produced energy was not immediately utilized. Forth came the local battery storage. Combining the renewables and the storage devices created the smart grid, a system in which residents of a neighbourhood produce and use energy together. Add a way to turn a profit, for example selling energy on the market and you have a business case to attract potential participants.
Though the idea sounds like it could be incredibly popular, there are some quirks and complications that need to be resolved before this type of energy system can be expanded on and sold to the Dutch
market. Some of this has to do with the participants, that play a significant role in the smart grid, as they are the ones using and producing the energy.
Abstract
This thesis examines the efforts made by the companies of the Virtual Power Plant in Amsterdam Nieuw-West to shape the participants of the project into a more fitting role within the Smart Grid system. Interviews were conducted with project managers and official documents and reports have been examined to investigate which methods the companies applied in reaching their goals. The findings of the research are that informing and educating the citizens is the most effective and worthwhile way to both have a good relationship with the homeowners and have them act favourably towards the benefit of future deployment possibilities for the Smart Grid. This means that the solutions for a better energy system are not limited to technical measures but include social aspects as well.
Contents
Preface ... 3
Abstract ... 4
Introduction ... 7
Positioning of the research ... 8
Research aims ... 9 Theoretical framework ... 10 Citizenship ... 10 Environmental citizenship ... 10 Energy citizenship ... 11 Case ... 13 Methodology ... 17 Sub questions ... 17 Data collection ... 17 Operationalisation ... 18 Table 1. Operationalisation ... 20 Research strategy ... 21 Research methods ... 22 CAQDAS analysis ... 22 Validity ... 22 Methodological shortcomings ... 23
Research results and Analysis ... 23
Awareness ... 23
Shaping awareness ... 24
Informing the citizens ... 24
Adjusting energy practices ... 25
Promoting the project ... 26
Including participants... 27
Benefits ... 28
Creating a sense of community ... 29
Technological skill ... 29
Applying data ... 31 Conclusion ... 32 Discussion... 33 Validity ... 33 Academic positioning ... 33 Shortcomings ... 34 Further research ... 35 Recommendations ... 35 Literature ... 36 Bijlage ... 39
Interview Michael Fraats ... 39
Interview Chris Aukema ... 49
Interview Martijn van der Eerden ... 59
Introduction
Climate change is this century’s largest challenge. Burning fossil fuels such as oil and coal for electricity production is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions with 25% of global emissions (EPA, 2017). The energy sector has substantial potential to become a forerunner in climate change mitigation (IPCC, 2011). The combination of the fact that the energy sector produces of the most emissions globally and that it also has the most potential for change, makes it an excellent candidate for the development of new technologies to prevent these emissions. Although it would be straightforward to simply cut down on energy use and thus reduce the emission of greenhouse gasses, the world population is ever growing and people are using ever more energy, as has energy consumption become a more integral part of our daily lives (Geerts, 2017; IEA, 2007).
Given increasing demand, reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in the energy sector may seem like an impossible task. There is an accessible and flexible way to make energy grids more self-sustaining and reliable. This technology is called the Smart Grid. It is a network that usually resides in a neighbourhood or multiple neighbourhoods, containing houses that both produce and consume energy through the use of photovoltaic panels. Now that consumers of electricity can also generate their own power, for instance by using photovoltaic panels on their rooftops, they are producers of electricity, making them prosumers (Goncalves Da Silva, 2014). Prosumers are able to sell their energy surplus to the Grid or store it in local batteries, offering them the possibility to make profit using the energy network.
When such a Smart Grid has been implemented the relations between prosumers, companies and governments has not come to an end. Unlike a regular product development cycle, where these two or three actors cooperate and when it is finished go their separate ways, a Smart Grid is an ongoing cycle of communication and improvement (de Vries et al., 2016). The companies that are involved in such a Smart Grid, such as energy companies and technology suppliers, would profit from an active prosumer that fits their technological infrastructure well. This means that it would reap great benefits if the people that are involved in the Smart Grid conform to the type of producer and consumer the company is looking for. Even if this is not the case, the company can still make efforts to either adapt the user to the technologies used, or vice versa.
A possible way to adjust prosumer behaviour to the dynamics of the Smart Grid, is shaping the prosumers’ energy citizenship practices. Energy citizenship revolves around awareness and dutifulness of prosumers regarding energy. The aim of this thesis is to investigate what efforts are made to shape energy citizenship in a Smart Grid context. This leads to the following research question: “How are energy companies
attempting to shape energy citizenship practices and narratives in the context of the Virtual Powerplant in Amsterdam Nieuw-West?”
Positioning of the research
The concept of a Smart Grid can be seen in the wider scope of the smart city. The smart city is often seen as the future city that incorporates technologies to further improve daily life (De Jong et al., 2015; Moir et al., 2014). There has been interest in smart cities from national governments and supranational organisations such as India’s Smart City Mission (Ministry of Urban Development, n.d.), the European Commission’s Smart City Solutions (GrowSmarter, n.d.) and the Smart City Challenge in the USA (US department of transportation, n.d.). Despite the support from political organisations, there are also critiques revolving around neoliberalism (Vanolo, 2014; Hollands, 2015) and privacy (Townsend, 2013; Rabari & Storper, 2014). The phenomenon of the smart city has received a lot of commercial hype from the marketeers and bookmakers, but questions have risen as to whether this is the best way to cast the concept to the greater public (Saunders and Baeck, 2015). Efforts have been made to render the smart city more citizen-centric, which brings out the question how citizenship in the smart city differs from traditional forms of citizenship (Joss et al., 2017).
To examine citizenship in the smart city, Jenson (2009) suggests looking into three dimensions. First is the ‘responsibility mix’ which revolves around the distribution of responsibility between the actors involved in the citizenship regime. Secondly, the rights and obligations that form the boundaries of the community. Last are the governing practices that involve the modes of citizen engagement and access. Using this three-dimensional evaluation of a citizenship regime, it is possible to discriminate between different types of citizenship (Hackell, 2007). Using these three dimensions results in a spectrum of citizenship regimes with two political traditions at each end. At one end is the individual-liberal and at the other is civic-republican (Kartal, 2002; Martravers & Pike, 2003). Through juxtaposing these two divergent political elements, essential differences are highlighted, which provides a relative perspective to citizenship in the smart city. The assumption here is that citizenship in the smart city can be placed on a purely political scale, but it is likely that this form of citizenship forges a new citizenship discourse, rather than align with one of the political traditions (Joss et al., 2017; Vanolo, 2016). This form will likely lend some of its aspects from both the civic-republican and individual-liberal traditions.
A sizable aspect of the smart city is increased sustainability within city regions. A widely discussed concept is the said Smart Grid. Literature on sustainability and energy transitions have revolved around macro level policy (Griggs et al., 2013), social acceptance (Wüstenhagen et al., 2007; Wolsink, 2012) and technological solutions (Zhou, 2016). The cited literature revolves around national and international politics, general popular acceptance and one-size-fits-all solutions. Due to the variety of politics, popular opinions and inert technical infrastructures these proposed solutions may not applicable everywhere or be equally effective.
The effectiveness of each of these aspects of the renewable energy systems partly relies on the type of citizen that is part of the energy transition. The attitude towards sustainability and renewable energy, bringing with it its rights and obligations, is called energy citizenship. This is seen as a branch of general citizenship, equal to environmental citizenship. In this study, energy citizenship is perceived as a deepening of the concept of environmental citizenship, as energy is one of the facets that makes up environmental concern. The specific nature of the sustainable energy system begs for dedicated scientific attention instead of looking at it from the perspective of general environmental citizenship.
Moreover, for a Smart Grid to be efficient and effective, the right kind of energy citizenship must be shaped. What this type of person is and what their energy practices are, mostly relies on the geographical context, the companies involved, and the technologies used. This means that there is not one type of ideal energy citizenship, and that each type of Smart Grid configuration needs a different energy citizen (Rhygaug et al., 2018).
Research aims
To fill the gap on energy citizenship in specific Smart Grid contexts, requires a case study on a local Smart Grid initiative. The aims of this thesis are to examine what efforts are made by the energy companies involved in the virtual powerplant in Amsterdam to shape certain energy citizenship practices. This firstly entails looking into the vision the companies have on the ideal energy citizen, as they will want to adjust their narrative accordingly. Second is studying the practices and technologies that are employed to shape the participant’s energy citizenship practices. This means looking into what efforts are made to let the participants develop the desired practices.
My research question is as follows:
How are energy companies attempting to shape energy citizenship practices and narratives in the context of the Virtual Powerplant in Amsterdam Nieuw-West?
1. What is the ideal energy citizen in the Virtual Powerplant?
Theoretical framework
Citizenship
The concept of citizenship comes in many different forms since it consists of different elements and is reliant on politics and context. At its core, citizenship is the citizens relation to the state and revolves around rights and obligations (Lister, 2003; Hoipkemier, 2015). The rights of citizenship find their roots in the liberal political movement, where the role of the state is limited. It is with these civic and political rights that the state guarantees political equality and freedom to create a sovereign citizen. Citizenship as an obligation refers to the civic duties of a citizen. These duties include political participation and when fulfilled, express the citizen as a political being at its full potential (Lister, 2003).
One of the definitions Hoipkemier (2015) gives for of citizenship focuses on the political rights a citizen can use to participate in the political process, through which they can influence the governance of their state. This means that the citizens of a state can take part in popular governance. The citizen is both the one that exerts power and the one that benefits from it (Hoipkemier, 2015).
Modern citizenship is identified as an essential aspect of social integration and solidarity. Moreover, citizenship is mainly created and sustained by social conflict and struggles (Flynn et al., 2008; Turner, 1990). These struggles are not limited by political boundaries and are present on all geographical scales as a result of globalisation. This process of globalisation is accompanied by economic growth and its negative consequences on the environment that have formed a threat to human health and safety (Turner, 2001). Numerous different social risks created by contemporary developments such as technology and environmental pollution have led to the origin of new forms of citizenship, as opposed to the single, political one. These modern risks require the classical concept of citizenship to be modified to include the rights and obligations paired with environmental and technological concerns (Newby, 1996; Flynn et al., 2008).
Environmental citizenship
Social scientists have been criticised for neglecting the relationship between society and nature, and instead regarding it as a dichotomous affiliation (Beck, 1995; Dickens, 1992; Newby 1991). Yearly (2005) suggests that conceptions on sustainable life revolve too much around technical and economic aspects and thus limit the potential of these conceptions. He proposes a more cultural and social perspective that takes equity, institutions and cultural practices into consideration. In the light of electricity for instance, much research has been done on technical solutions for energy conservation and new energy sources. Some have examined consumer behaviour, but little is research has focused on people’s perspective on their ownership and use of energy as a commodity and social resource (Flynn et al, 2008; Yearly, 2005). Environmental citizenship has been popularised within political spheres and has been put to practice by environmental movements and lobbyists (Dobson, 2003).
Energy citizenship
It is suggested that the concept of citizenship in a political sense can be extended to citizenship in an environmental and energy sense. When looking at citizenship from an environmental perspective, the rights and obligations revolve less around power regimes, and more around awareness and dutifulness (Flynn et al., 2008; Devine-Wright, 2007). Awareness of energy consumption has been relatively low due to people only seeing the energy bill at the end of each month. The meaningless numbers make energy consumption an abstract thing and results in people not feeling the need to reduce their energy use, other than for monetary reasons. For energy users to become more aware and more dutiful about their electricity consumption, they must be presented with an actual, understandable way to interpret their own energy habits. Moreover, for the technological transition to renewable energy to reach the public, not only should governance regimes and technological systems change (Geels, 2002), but more importantly, the public will have to support and accept the energy transition (Ryghaug et al., 2018).
To stage energy citizenship among energy users, companies can employ practices to create ‘mundane energy citizenship’ (Rhygaug et al., 2018), which refers to the institutionalisation of the everyday rights and obligations that come with being an energy user. The main way of doing this is by providing energy users with smart technologies that monitor their consumption and, if they have solar panels, their production. Smart technology provides customers with a tangible way of managing an abstract problem. Earlier, they could only check their electricity usage through a meter hidden away in a cabinet, displaying an abstract number, now the data is in their homes. Not only is the data more readily available, it is also more comprehensible and interpretable for the non-professional. Accessibility of the data is helping people understand what they have got to change in their own homes to save energy. The smart technology thus not only provides a new way of visualising and interpreting a formerly abstract concept of energy usage, it also allows the consumer to act upon their energy consumption.
Having renewable energy technology can also act as a statement. The solar panels on someone’s roof are visible to the entire neighbourhood and is a testimony to the neighbours that they are investing in ways to help save the planet (Rhygaug et al., 2018; Throndsen et al., 2017).
Technologies in households measure, quantify and visualize energy consumption and production in ways that provide a means for better energy measurement. This allows for new communication methods between prosumers and companies.
According to Rhygaug et al. (2018), people living in households equipped with smart technologies express a duality when it comes to the influence of these technologies on their lives. On the one hand, daily practices such as cooking, showering and doing laundry are difficult to change, as they are dependent on work schedules. These mundane routines often do not change (Goulden et al., 2014). On the flipside, users are also able to change other routines they were not able to alter beforehand, using these smart technologies. When these changes are made, energy has been visualized and embodied. An issue to be solved through the visualisation of energy usage is the phenomenon of a ‘peak load’. This happens when energy intensive appliances are used at the same time, stressing the grid’s capacity. Participation through smart technologies can prevent these peak loads through better scheduling of such energy intensive tasks
(Friis and Christensen, 2016). This is a bottom-up solution, but there is also a top-down solution in the form of rules that state when certain appliances can be used (Skjolsvold et al., 2017).
The photovoltaic solar cell panels are the main drivers behind the changing role of the consumer in the energy market. Ownership of energy production has shifted from centralised to localised, changing its meaning from a market object, to a more common oriented good (Wolsink, 2012).
Case
A Smart Grid can be defined as intelligent energy networks that combine generators, consumers and prosumers to provide a secure and consistent energy supply that is both renewable and profitable (Wolsink, 2012). It uses sensors, computational technology and ICT-solutions to enhance the efficiency of electricity delivery systems (Goncalves Da Silva, 2014). The flexibility of the Smart Grid is enabled by PV panels that can be applied on almost all residential dwellings, making it possible for most people to participate. Not only can the Smart Grid deliver more power into the energy network, it also raises awareness about people’s consumption patterns, since most grids allow users to view their electricity in- and output.
The case I will be examining is the City-Zen Smart Grid in Amsterdam Nieuw-West. It is equipped with technology for monitoring the stability and performance of the grid. The voltages are remotely monitored by the energy company Liander. Ambitions are to detect power outages and time windows when supply is low, making them visible and preventing them in the future. More than 10.000 dwellings are connected to the ‘End-2-End’ grid. The grid is stable without issues in grid stability. Future projects are vehicle integration into the grid, enhancing energy trading through algorithms, developing monitoring equipment and further developing the grid control.
The research will be focused on a specific part of the City-Zen project: the Virtual Power Plant. This experiment started in 2016 and ended in 2019. The project consists of around 45 houses that are equipped with solar panels, local energy storage and smart meters. The Virtual Power Plant Smart Grid is not concentrated in one or multiple connected streets, its connected houses are distributed across Amsterdam Nieuw-West. The goal of the project is to demonstrate the effectiveness of a Virtual Power Plant based on batteries in multiple homes. It is also a showcase of the possibility of a virtual powerplant being economically profitable, by selling energy when the prices are high, and buying when the prices are low. For the users to be able to sell at price peaks, they need to have energy ready to ship, which is made possible by the small local batteries. The moment of selling must be determined the day before, so an algorithm is used to determine the best expected time to sell and buy energy. All the connected users are considered as one large buyer and seller of energy and are thus able to scale their profits. Together, the houses act as a ‘Virtual Power Plant’.
This sub-project is primarily led by the company Liander and NeoSmart. NeoSmart is a company that is centred around consumers in the energy network. The ‘neo’ in the company’s name derives from the concept of ‘New Energy Order’, which refers to the new hierarchy that will arise along the growing trend towards locally generated renewable energy. In this ‘order’ the prosumer will have greater interaction with other actors on the energy market, and monetary advantages will be divided across all actors. NeoSmart was contracted by Liander to serve as an energy provider for all the participants. The company was responsible for the construction of the Virtual Power Plant, the development of the software and the creation of an artificial intelligence to power the grid’s operations. They did not have to carry this burden alone since the company Energy Exchange Enablers (EXE) did a lot of work on the software and AI.
Liander is the grid operator in Amsterdam and is responsible for all infrastructure regarding electricity, gas, water and waste. The company manages the cables and commutators in the energy network. Their infrastructure is static of nature, meaning that their hardware needs to last for another half decade. Their primary goal in the project is to examine how they can transform the city to be more sustainable in the context of energy. This project offers the company a way to experiment with new technologies and investigate what they need to do in order to cope with changes in the future. Most important is the ability to cope with peak loads that happen when either a lot of energy is retrieved from the net or when a lot of energy is delivered to the net.
EXE is a company whose mission is to provide accessible and relatively cheap access to energy, based on decentralised production and consumption. Their method of reaching this goal is the digitalisation of energy networks and deploying smart solutions for complicated problems. They designed the product called Real time Energy Exchange (REX) that balances all devices in a cluster into some sort of ecosystem that naturally reacts to virtual market prices for energy. Where previously it was only possible to handle energy trading in one device at a time, it is now possible to operate all devices at the same time. Moreover, the devices can now operate all by themselves, instead of someone having to control them manually. Another company called Sympower created a product that makes predictions based on the combined usage of all households, historical data and weather predictions to make an estimate on how much the production and consumption of energy will be. This is weighed against expected market prices to make a plan on when to buy and when to sell energy. These predictions are in turn used by EXE, in combination with their product ENTRNCE. ENTRNCE facilitates and registers transactions made between producers and consumers of electricity in accordance with the rules of the Dutch energy market.
Documentation on the Virtual Power Plant project proposes some opportunities, barriers and solutions that the project brings across several dimensions. First of the technical and geographical opportunities is the hardware independence of the virtual powerplant. The smart technologies in people’s homes are connected to the existing energy grid and do not require radical interventions in existing hardware making it a flexible option for people without pre-installed hardware. This independence allows the technology to be used in all energy markets and thus is not limited to a single type of energy system. Another technical opportunity is the potential of photovoltaic panels in countries that both have more sun hours and are closer to the equator than the Netherlands, since the panels are more efficient in those circumstances. The technical challenges are mostly centred around limitations of technological challenges regarding battery settings and operator access. Furthermore, the simultaneity of energy consumption and production differs across geographical locations and might require rewriting the algorithms that buy and sell energy.
With the political and legal dimensions in mind, the challenges take the form of market regulations, net metering and legal restrictions. Market regulations currently prevent variable pricing for electricity, which prevents greater efficiency in selling and buying energy, thus leading to lesser profits. Net metering is both an advantage and disadvantage to the Virtual Power Plant system. Net metering happens when prosumers use as much energy as they produce, thus having a net of zero on their energy meter. It is an advantage in the way that it allows users to save on their energy bills by taking as much electricity from the grid as they deliver back to it. The disadvantage to this is that when users use their stored energy, that energy cannot be used to trade on the energy market, and thus hinders the business case of the Smart Grid.
Imbalance on the energy market is one of the financial and economic opportunities the Virtual Power Plant could. Due to the inconsistent draining and delivering of energy by the energy trading system, the incumbent energy market is shaken up, figuratively speaking. Moreover, imbalance of the energy market leads to greater price fluctuations that allow better margins for energy buying and selling. Another opportunity for the Virtual Power Plant is application of the same technology on different energy markets, and serving multiple energy markets by a single Virtual Power Plant. The latter means that the technologies allow for multiple grid systems to function together as one.
An important social opportunity is the ability of customers to have a direct impact on the Virtual Power Plant. In essence, the customers are the ones producing the energy used in the Virtual Power Plant, and thus play a large part in the Smart Grid system. The underlying ideal of the Smart Grid system is of course to save energy and prevent environmental damage, and thus one of the environmental opportunities is the expansion of renewable energy. A challenge, both technical and environmental, is energy loss that occurs as a result of loading and discharging of batteries.
The initial expectations for the Virtual Power Plant project were reductions in the emission of greenhouse gasses due to the consumption of self-generated energy. Usually, someone with photovoltaic panels uses about 30% of the energy they produce, but by using a local battery the predictions were that the efficiency would double to around 60%. When scaling up to the city-level, the innovation in Smart Grid technologies could lead to the expansion of renewable energy production without a need to invest in or rebuild grid infrastructures. Furthermore, the grid would be more stable and robust.
Methodology
In this chapter the practical matters regarding the research will be discussed. First, the sub questions will be explained and then examined as to why they are useful for answering the main research question. Next, the concept of energy citizenship will be operationalised to get a better understanding of what the concept entails. Subsequently, the research method and case will be discussed, after which will be explained how the sub questions are researched.
Sub questions
To answer the main research question “How are energy companies attempting to shape energy citizenship
practices and narratives in the context of the Virtual Powerplant in Amsterdam Nieuw-West?”, the
following sub questions will be used.
1. What is the ideal energy citizen in the Virtual Powerplant?
This question will shed light on an important aspect in the shaping of energy citizenship by the companies involved in the project. It depicts the desired goal by shaping energy citizenship practices and narratives. To answer this question, it must be examined how the companies see the ideal energy citizen.
2. What technologies and practices are deployed to shape energy citizenship practices?
This sub question examines through which methods the companies attempt to shape energy citizenship amongst participants. This question can be answered by investigating into how the companies approach shaping energy citizenship practices and narratives.
Data collection
The data used in this thesis is derived from interviews and official documents. The documents used are
Eerste indrukken uit het klantenonderzoek van het City-zen VPP pilot project (2017), Final report for the integration of a VPP system (2019), Summary Report City-zen VPP Social Monitoring (2018), Op weg naar de virtuele energiecentrale (No Date), and numerous newsletters distributed by City-zen. Three interviews
were conducted with project managers and product managers, who are all involved in creating and shaping the Smart Grid project. One interview was held with Michael Fraats, owner of NeoSmart and involved since the beginning of the Virtual Power Plant project. He was deeply involved with both the technology and the participants, and he was present at all the participant meetings. The second interview was with Chris Aukema, product manager at EXE, the company that created REX. REX managed the communication between all devices installed in the Smart Grid. Even though Aukema joined later in the project, he was able to provide a clear image of the functioning of the software and had extensive knowledge of events and occurrences during the duration of the project. The third interview was held with Martijn van der Eerden, project manager Strategy and Innovation at Liander, a Dutch grid operator.
Operationalisation
To study what efforts are made by the companies involved in the Smart Grid to shape energy citizenship practices and narratives, it is crucial to narrow down what these energy citizenship practices and narratives entail. The concept of shaping energy citizenship can be subdivided into four dimensions: awareness, dutifulness, privileges and technological skill.
Awareness encompasses the passive perceptions people have on renewable energy and the energy transition. First indicator to this dimension is the awareness of the citizen on the need of the renewable energy transition. This is quite broad, as there are many aspects that can increase awareness of the need to decrease pollution and global warming. Even though this type of awareness is probably already present with people participating in this project, the companies might still have reasons to foster environmental awareness. The second indicator to the awareness dimension is the prosumer’s consciousness about their consumption and production. This refers to the prosumer’s physical and psychological proximity to their production technology. The technologies are installed in their homes and they themselves have interest in how the devices operate. Devine-Wright (2007) describes this as a shift from ‘plug and forget’ to ‘in sight and mind’. Third and last indicator is the citizen’s awareness of the changes they need to make in their daily lives to better fit the technologies installed in their house. A part of being a citizen in the smart city is living and interacting with technologies that make the city ‘smart’. This is a reciprocal relationship, as citizens shape the technology in the way that they use it, and the technology shapes the citizen by offering new possibilities and opportunities in their daily lives. In Smart Grid systems the network of relations consists of the prosumer, the physical technology and the software. The physical and software technology mostly work in unison, but it is unlikely that the prosumer will be a perfect fit for the devices (Goulden et al., 2014). For a prosumer to get more benefits from the technology, they will have to adapt certain parts of their daily routine.
Dutifulness, the second dimension of energy citizenship, revolves around the individual conceptions of the citizen that make them feel like they must act against climate change (Yearly, 2005). The dutifulness refers to the obligational aspect of citizenship, as being a citizen in the smart city brings with it both rights and duties. An important part of energy citizenship is the citizen’s motivation to switch to renewable energy and thus take part in the energy transition. The obligational part of this indicator is the fact that if a citizen desires to combat climate change in their homes, they are required to invest in the technology and infrastructure needed to do so. The next indicator is centred around communication and participation. The duty to actively participate in the energy system refers to the citizen providing feedback to the companies and taking advice and instructions from these companies. By doing this, the citizens can express their concerns and ideas to the companies, providing them with a clear way of tackling certain client-side problems, instead of guessing what the source of the problem is.
Complementary to obligations is privileges as a part of energy citizenship. Being a citizen in the smart city means having both obligations and privileges that mostly originate from the new technologies and devices that make up the smart city. Primary benefit from being a citizen in a Smart Grid network is the generation of renewable energy from local devices such as photovoltaic panels and windmills. Production of green energy and subsequently reduction of carbon emissions is the primary goal for the users of Smart Grid technologies. Not only does this satisfy the ambitions of the prosumer, it also saves them money as they do not need to purchase as much energy as before when they produce some of it themselves. In relation to this Smart Grid case, participants would be able to gain a small profit from the selling and buying of energy on the energy market.
Indicator for the community dimension is a sense of community amongst those that generate renewable energy as well. Doing something together stimulates. It satisfies the prosumer desire to participate in the energy transition and simultaneously spreads the word on their efforts to create a more sustainable energy system. In doing so, prosumers might inspire others to invest in green energy as well and therefore “spread” their energy citizenship.
The last dimension to the concept of energy citizenship is technological skill which encompasses everything that has to do with the relationship between the user and the devices installed in their homes. This is an important aspect of energy citizenship as a complicated technological system might deter participants from interacting with it and thus limiting their engagement with the project. This might lead to companies taking an interest in educating the participants on the operation of batteries and other in-home technologies. Another benefit to be gained through informing the participants on operating the battery is that they might be able to do basic problem solving when something goes wrong, avoiding the inconvenience of sending a professional over to fix the possibly simple problem. Additionally, the participants can monitor their production and consumption of energy through a digital application. This data might be moderately cryptic to the average person, limiting the transparency of the monitoring software. As people tend to want to know what is happening in their homes, this moderate uncertainty regarding the monitoring software might lead to annoyances among homeowners and questions towards the companies. The companies thus have ample reason to educate the participants on their in-home technologies, for their own benefit, and that of the prosumers. Were the companies to instruct the prosumers on interpreting their smart monitors, then they might receive less questions and might experience less dissatisfaction from the users. Improving the prosumer’s ability to interpret their smart meters more effectively might also increase user’s awareness of their consumption and production, as mentioned before. Third indicator to the technological skill dimension is stimulating the participants to apply information retrieved through technology to their daily lives. This expands on the interpreting of the data from smart meters and investigates whether companies take an interest in encouraging participants to apply this newly found information to their daily lives and energy practices. Users might for instance see a pattern in their battery’s loading and discharging times, and could adjust their own routines to that of the battery to save more energy and increase profit margins.
Table 1. Operationalisation
Concept Dimensions Indicators Method
Shaping Energy citizenship
Awareness Making the citizen aware of the need of the renewable energy transition (Wolsink, 2012)
Incentivising awareness of consumption and production of energy (Christensen et al., 2017; Devine-Wright, 2007)
Informing the citizen of the changes they need to make in their daily lives to better fit the technology (Goulden et al., 2014)
Interviews Documents
Dutifulness (obligations)
Promoting the project to make people participate in the renewable energy transition (Yearly, 2005) Including the citizen in the process of the Smart Grid project
Interviews Documents
Privileges (rights) The citizen can benefit from renewable energy benefits
Interviews Documents
Community Creating a sense of community amongst producers of renewable energy (Rhygaug et al., 2018)
Interviews Documents
Technological skill Educating the homeowners on the operation of the installed devices Enabling the prosumer to interpret data from the monitoring technology Stimulating participants to apply information retrieved through technology to their daily lives
Interviews Documents
Research strategy
This thesis uses a qualitative research strategy, for the subject of this study is impossible to quantify and thus lends itself to a more descriptive approach. Qualitative research allows for rich descriptions of governance practices and goals. Moreover, energy citizenship is not a uniform concept across all geographical scales and places, so using a quantitative approach, that suggests that an observation here would be similar elsewhere, would infer that energy citizenship is generally applicable. In this study the goal is not to gather generalisable data to be used on other Smart Grid cases or research, rather, the aim is to assess what actions are taken to shape energy citizenship in the context of the Virtual Power Plant in Amsterdam Nieuw-West.
Theory will be formed through analytic induction, as the goal of this thesis is to gather data on an individual case and draw a conclusion from the data that is only applicable on this unique case (Bryman, 2016). Even though the data will not be generalisable to other Smart Grid contexts, the gathered information might still be useful for others that want to investigate energy citizenship practices or for those that are themselves trying to shape certain energy citizenship practices.
My research design is a single, embedded case study. The case is the City-Zen Smart Grid in Amsterdam Nieuw-West. There are few functioning smart grids in the Netherlands, and for time reasons this will be a single case study. A case study has high ecological validity, which is exactly what I am looking for my research, since my aim is to specifically investigate efforts made by the companies to shape energy citizenship practices in this particular case. The case study is a revelatory one, as it investigates something that is relatively new and is experimental in design (Bryman, 2016).
The method to analyse the collected data will be a thematic analysis of the interviews and documents. This means that the interviews must be transcribed and then analysed for specific themes and patterns. The transcribed interviews will be coded along the lines of the operationalisation, making clear which part corresponds with which indicator. Using these codes, I will be able to identify my concepts within an in-depth, semi-structured interview.
For my data collection I have done semi-structured interviews with project managers. A key items list was constructed through operationalisation of the concept of shaping energy citizenship. By using a list of key items, all areas of interest were covered with room for additional questions and follow up questions (Bryman, 2016). Moreover, for each interview, the key items list was altered slightly to ask questions about their specific role in the company and to ask about energy citizenship in relation to their product and function in the project. With semi-structured interviews, there is a possibility that the questions have a suggestive undertone, so by using the book Social Research Methods (Bryman, 2016) to set up the item list, it was ensured that the questions were as less suggestive as possible.
The project managers will provide a perspective on the relation between the prosumers and themselves. With the experiences and professional information these actors can provide, it might be possible to identify certain processes in their relations with the prosumers that may not be visible or important to the individual prosumer. Moreover, the project managers have a responsibility towards residents, as they need to make compromises and reach consensuses with the residents in order for them to keep wanting to be a part of the Smart Grid. This means that they do not have complete control over the process, which would be the case in a regular product development process.
Research methods
This paragraph discusses the way the data is retrieved and analysed, and how this might add to or jeopardise the validity of the thesis.
CAQDAS analysis
Collected data is analysed using a CAQDAS analysis. This stands for Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis and is done using a program called Atlas.ti. The program takes in any form of document and allows the user to select certain quotes from the text and add codes to them. Atlas.ti works well for organising the collected data and analysing it in a structured way. When the codes are applied to parts of the text, they are easily retrieved to view all quotes with single code. The program only provides the researcher with a way to perform a structured analysis and does not analyse anything for the researcher, this must be done manually.
There are two ways to construct coding lists: bottom up and top down coding. Bottom up coding generates codes by analysing the texts, and then creating codes. Top down coding means that the codes are created along the lines of pre-defined categories discussed in the theory. The codes used in this analysis are derived from the operationalisation of the concept of shaping energy citizenship. As the operationalisation is made by using the academic literature, the list of codes is as well. The code list consists of terms and short descriptions of what is said or written in a text. The codes are constructed to encompass the contents of the quote, without making them too complicated or making too many. To preserve transparency, the coding list and the coded texts will be attached to the thesis.
Validity
Internal validity of a case is the degree in which the researcher’s observations coincide with the used theoretical framework (Bryman, 2016). The assumption is that this thesis will have a considerably high internal validity.
When the results of a study are generalisable to other cases, it means that the external validity of the case is high (Bryman, 2012). The external validity of this case study is expected to be mediocre. As the Virtual
Power Plant operates under specific circumstances which are not present in other Smart Grid experiments, the results are unlikely to be completely applicable to other smart grids. The case is special because it is done in an actual neighbourhood, and not in a living lab, resulting in the project having a lot of uncontrollable variables, as opposed to a more experimental setting. An added aspect to this Smart Grid case is buying and selling of electricity on the energy market, one that is not present in most other Smart Grid projects. These complications make this case unique, and result in the results having a weak external validity. However, lessons learned by the companies are applicable to other projects revolving around energy experimentation. Due to this, the overall external validity is regarded as mediocre.
Methodological shortcomings
All methods of analysis have their strengths and weaknesses, and so does CAQDAS. Firstly, the deeper meaning behind texts is neglected when pieces of text are assigned one or more codes that clouds the essence of the words that were written or said. Another flaw is that the codes are mostly up to the researcher’s interpretation which hampers replicability. Moreover, conducting a thematic analysis using CAQDAS results in the fragmentation of pieces of text (Bryman, 2016).
To deal with these flaws, some precautions and countermeasures are taken. To maintain the meaning of a text, the entire relevant part of text is highlighted and coded, not just words or sentences, preserving its context. To limit the amount of influence the researcher’s interpretation has on creating codes one can only be thoughtful of this methodological shortcoming and try to avoid it as much as possible.
Research results and Analysis
In this part of the thesis, an analysis will be conducted to examine the efforts made by the companies in the Virtual Power Plant project to shape energy citizenship practices and narratives and their reasoning behind them. Each indicator in the operationalisation table will be discussed. How do the companies perceive their efforts? What do they think they will contribute to both the Smart Grid and the participants? Furthermore, it is assessed whether they think their efforts would be useful to shape this certain aspect, and what their company has done to shape it.
Awareness
It is stated in academic literature that awareness of energy consumption and production is relevant in a Smart Grid context and might contribute to energy citizenship narratives and could alter energy citizenship practices as well (Wolsink, 2012). From the interviews it can be derived that the awareness of energy consumption and production would be somewhat useful, as they could become more apt to accept certain changes in their daily routines. As one of the project managers said however, a flexible user would never be as flexible as a battery that offers full-fledged optionality.
Another said that the awareness would not have an effect on the Smart Grid systems as such, especially when larger groups are involved. Ideally, awareness of consumption and production would lead to someone using less energy or use energy more strategically. If a prosumer did neither of these, the Smart Grid would still take into account the energy usage, make a prediction based on the consumption patterns and create a planning for the trade on the electricity market. The only effect of a user’s awareness would be the extra saving of electricity usage, resulting in a slightly larger pay-out at the end of the road. The virtual power plant conducted its trading on the Spot market, which has price peaks in the morning, before everyone goes off to work, and in the evening, when everyone comes home from work. This feature of the Spot trading market would allow the prosumers to slightly adjust their energy consumption to avoid these hours. An example provided is the charging of electric cars during the night, rather than powering up its battery immediately as it is plugged in.
Shaping awareness
When asked what the project partners had done to shape or stimulate awareness, they all said they did not attempt to do so. Participants were already energy conscious people and for someone to participate in a project like this awareness of the need for an energy transition is mostly a given.
The one thing that had the capability to provide insight into the users’ energy production and consumption behaviour was the smart meter that came with the battery. Initially this seemed as a promising addition to the in-home technologies. However, the data visualisation proofed to be cryptic and lacking insight into the homeowner’s energy behaviour.
Informing the citizens
When it comes to providing the participants with information regarding the Smart Grid, the manager of NeoSmart stated that he, were he to do this again and would have involved the participants more during the middle part of the project timeline. This did not have any negative effects on participation or enthusiasm but were this product to be offered as a commercial service, then provisioning of information to customers should be more regularly and more extensively.
Especially when it comes to energy losses suffered by in-home batteries, the owner of NeoSmart said that he would have informed participants about this earlier. He stated that it was a foreseeable flaw and that communication regarding financial compensation was lacking and disorganised. Some people started noticing that they were using more energy and were thus losing money while the project goals were to be sustainable and possibly profitable. Even though this was a particularly important issue, communications are important across the board, to involve participants more often and more intensively.
Similarly, the product manager of EXE said that in hindsight, the practical operation of the battery should have been explained in more detail. The batteries reacted to financial stimuli from the energy market and had internal mechanisms to balance the battery load across the grid. This meant that the battery would occasionally turn on, even when the individual user was not using any electricity. This led to confusion amongst users and resulted in some participants to manually turn off the battery. Questions were raised about this and the companies clarified that this was just the way the batteries worked. The batteries work as a group and sometimes act unpredictable when compared to individual consumption patterns. Most people however reacted positively and were excited to be a part of this experiment. The EXE product manager stated that it is necessary to keep the participants in the know about the functioning of the batteries. When it comes to finding participants, it would not be favourable to elaborate on the hassle that is incorporated in such a project.
As questions about the technologies piled up, NeoSmart made the decision to provide dedicated support for questions about the Smart Grid in general, which improved the relationship between the company and the participants significantly. This especially showed during the last meeting, where almost all the participants showed up. Not only did the Smart Grid citizens always have someone to ask their questions, they received their answer on a short notice, which has proven to be quite a relief for them. Another effort to improve the provisioning of information to participants was creating a newsletter to update the readers on things happening in the project and keeping them involved in the learning process.
When it comes to the technologies that are installed in people’s homes the supply of information is a tool to keep things running smoothly. Some technical information regarding the maintenance of the battery could be useful for homeowners to do some basic troubleshooting when something goes wrong. On the flipside, when participants have some expertise on the operation of the battery, they might tinker with it themselves and possibly disrupt the complicated structure of the virtual power plant.
As technical support was set up and questions about battery behaviour were cleared up, the amount of questions reduced, and participants reacted more positively to the virtual power plant as a whole.
Adjusting energy practices
According to the literature, the prosumer will not be a perfect fit for the technology and might have to change some of their daily routines and practices for them to be a proper match for the installed devices (Goulden et al., 2010). In practice, things tend to pan out quite differently. When asked whether there are certain habits prosumers could adopt to better adjust to the Smart Grid, the owner of NeoSmart said:
“It’s the Smart Grid’s task to solve the mismatch between demand and supply as cleverly as possible. If I ask someone to adjust their habits and daily routines, I wouldn’t need the Smart Grid.”
This is a crucial part of the relationship between energy citizenship and the Smart Grid system. Once someone is a participant of a Smart Grid, they are not required to do anything to try and better fit the
smart energy solutions, since they are designed to deal with inconsistent and unpredictable consumption patterns.
When discussing a prosumer’s energy practices both predictability and optionality should be considered. Predictability refers to someone having a standard energy usage pattern, making it simpler for the smart energy solutions to calculate when energy should be traded and how much. To trade energy on the market, one must decide when and how much one day in advance. This makes having predictable energy consumers might result in a more accurate prediction and thus larger profit margins. Optionality expands on predictability. It refers to the participants providing the companies with a profile that includes whether they have preferences and whether they are flexible regarding battery usage at certain times. Although optionality may provide the companies with a more certain electricity provision, they can not expect users to always maintain their submitted energy patterns.
Another aspect to this is the experimental nature of the project. As stated before, Liander’s primary objective is to develop a more sustainable city, which entails looking into green energy projects to investigate what they need to do to keep the electricity net functional for the coming decades. Project manager Strategy and Innovation Martijn van der Eerden of Liander stated that they, as a grid operator, would benefit from a participant that uses and produces energy representative of the average Dutch household as possible. This would allow the company to extrapolate their findings regarding peak energy loads and stress on the energy grid. To shape the participants to ‘be as normal as possible’, Liander stated that they would regard the participant’s energy usage and production as a fixed variable and use the battery as a mechanism to create the grid’s flexibility by tinkering with it. Regarding energy citizenship practices, this might be a limiting factor for developing energy citizenship in the grander scheme of the smart city. This concept refers to people becoming more aware of the need of the transition of our energy system to a more sustainable one. It includes both narratives and practices concerning renewable energy. When a company requires participants of the project to continue their energy practices in a ‘business as usual’ scenario, even if it is a necessary measure to more effectively transition to the new energy system, then the participants might be less likely to develop practices and narratives that are part of energy citizenship. A thing to consider however, is that the participants might already be concerned with renewables and saving energy, thus rendering the ‘business as usual’ scenario not as representative to the average Dutch household as it could be.
Promoting the project
The geographic location of the project was set in advance due to mostly technical reasons. Subsequently, the search for participants started. There were a few criteria for residents of Amsterdam Nieuw-West to join this project: having photovoltaic panels and being able to install a battery in one’s home. To promote the project amongst the inhabitants of Nieuw-West, a promotion campaign started including flyers, media attention and events where people could gather information on the project. These efforts led to around one hundred people being interested in participating. Van der Eerden describes a process of the reciprocal
propagation of curiosity between neighbours, as they might have spoken amongst themselves about participating and decided to join the project together. This explains why there are certain streets that have multiple participating households. At the end of the project, around 45 participants remained.
When promoting a project such as this, one could say the companies strived to engage people’s energy citizenship. People’s motivations to join the Virtual Power Plant included curiosity, economical gain, sustainability and joining forces on a local scale. When the companies invoke people’s energy citizenship, then they might be more inclined to join. The main way this was done was appealing to the residents’ sense of duty towards battling climate change. A free solution was offered to reduce a household’s carbon footprint, and all that was requested of the participants was having solar panels installed. The Virtual Power Plant was also framed as an experiment and as a pioneering project, which sparked curiosity and was reason enough for some of the residents to join (Boekelo, 2017).
Including participants
After finding participants for the Virtual Power Plant, the project was in an early stage and was considerably imperfect. It is not expected for an experimental initiative such as this one to be impeccable, but participants grew dissatisfied in the way they were uninformed and uneducated on the operation of their in-home technologies. The companies recognised their shortcomings and made an effort to enhance their relationship with the homeowners. The main method of improving their standings with the users was informing them in a more participatory way. This meant doing more than handing out manuals, and it took considerable endeavour to reach the quality of relationship that the companies now have with the participants. A key element in improving the homeowners’ education on the battery’s behaviour and the interpretation of the smart meters were the participant gatherings. During the project, there were three gatherings where the users were updated on developments in the Virtual Power Plant and where they were able to ask questions about their personal concerns regarding their in-home technology. These have proven to be quite successful, as the turn-out was reasonably high, increasing with each of the following gatherings. The last meeting was used to evaluate on the lessons learned and the project’s results. During this meeting the feedback was relatively positive as a result of the other efforts made by the companies to inform and include the participants. One of these was providing a workshop, facilitated by the University of Wageningen, on the functionality of the installed battery and on the value of owning such a battery. Uncertainty regarding the battery’s operation was another burden for the users, which this workshop helped explain and alleviate.
A measure taken by NeoSmart specifically was assigning one employee to take all phone calls from participants and answer their questions quickly and accurately, relieving a lot of pressure from the company’s employees who received calls and did not have answers ready.
Benefits
The primary benefit of a Smart Grid system is the decentralised generation of electricity to reduce carbon emissions from centralised, grand scale power plants. Personal interests range from curiosity to insight to excitement about the battery. While most people were not taking part in this initiative for the money, it might be regarded as a bonus to combatting climate change. The monetary aspect of the project included trading on the energy market to turn a profit and saving on electricity by using renewable energy sources.
Before starting the project, the interested residents were informed that they would receive a rebate on their electricity bill, since they would have to switch to NeoSmart as their energy provider to join the project. The main economic gain was promised to come from the trading done on the energy market by adaptively reacting to price fluctuations and weather forecasts. The ability to gain a profit by using the batteries for buying and selling energy was not guaranteed, thus the companies assured the customers that they would receive compensation were the battery to lose money rather than make it. The former, however, was the case during the span of the project. Initially, this raised concerns and questions about the efficiency and the profitability of the smart battery solution. Due to this being an experimental setting, there were many technical complications demanding attention. As mentioned before, the energy loss suffered by the batteries was the main reason for the lower than expected efficiency and profit margins.
Relating this course of promises and outcomes to energy citizenship, it is possible to outline some key aspects relating to the concept.
A significant reason for joining was being able to produce green energy and subsequently save energy. The loss of electricity caused by technicalities in the batteries disappointed people, some to the extent that they turned their battery off. Nevertheless, most people recognised that the project was intended for learning and experimenting purposes. Van der Eerden stated that trust in the companies to fix the problem was an important factor to the relationship between companies and participants:
“In advance to a project like this, you cannot guarantee that nothing unforeseen happens and you have to trust each other that it will be brought to a successful conclusion and be patient. Eventually something will go wrong, we still have to figure out what the battery losses bring about and how to compensate them. Some people said they will turn of their battery until they know more, others said it was fine and that they believe that the issue was high on your [the company’s] agenda, and that they will be compensated in due time.”
The quotation indicates that having confidence in the company’s ability to resolve the problems of the smart grid is an influential part of being an energy citizen in a smart grid experiment. Realising the benefits from joining might be scarce in the foreseeable future and recognising the potential for a technological system like this is what the companies require of the citizens.
Another issue, later resolved by the companies, was the initial lack of insight and control. Prior to taking part in the project, people were interested in having supervision over and awareness of their energy usage and production. Due to the aforementioned unclear data visualisation and lack of information, some enthusiasm amongst participants was quenched (Boekelo, 2017). The companies rectified their shortcomings by hosting the participants meetings where they sought to answer all questions from the homeowners and to assure them that they were working on a solution. Through accommodating these meetings, the companies aimed to revive some aspects of energy citizenship that were lost as a consequence to their shortcomings. The participants could ask their questions and voice their concerns, receiving adequate response and a sense of acknowledgement.
Creating a sense of community
City-zen promised to provide ‘collective autonomy’ to the homeowners participating in the smart grid. The exact definition and effect of ‘collective’ was still unclear to the users, but the ‘togetherness’ was still important to a part of the group (Boekelo, 2017). Some participants were keen on the idea of producing energy with and for each other. They were passionate about the project and wanted to share this with other homeowners. In the starting phase of the Virtual Power Plant, Van der Eerden observed that in certain streets multiple homeowners joined the project, which he accredits to the narrative in the community.
“You could see that residents [of Amsterdam Nieuw-West] spoke to their neighbours, resulting in a clustering of people in the same street joining [the project].”
This process can be identified as the reciprocal shaping of energy citizenship, where people amongst themselves are encouraged to take part in the project. Early in the project there were insufficient efforts to stimulate this development. Down the road however, the same participant gatherings were used to let the homeowners discuss motives and issues regarding the Virtual Power Plant. Additionally, the workshop provided by the Wageningen University provided the users with a way to once again meet the other participants and express and share their own ideas on what the Smart Grid means to them. Furthermore, their collective knowledge and insights concerning energy management led to a new perspective on how Smart Grids could be used in the interest of a neighbourhood (Boekelo, 2018).
Technological skill
Advantages to participants having technical knowledge are avoiding unnecessary questions and having them perform basic troubleshooting in case of technical problems. Michael Fraats, owner of NeoSmart, specified that technical knowledge would be useful for basic troubleshooting but not for manually operating the smart technologies.
“It is our job to operate things from a distance and make sure everything works on a technical level, and it is useful for people to have basic technical knowledge so they can perform basic trouble shooting. […] It would be useful if they have some knowledge, not for operational purposes, but for troubleshooting.”
On the other side of the coin resides the negative aspects of a technically well-educated prosumer. Where participants with low levels of technical skills and knowledge may ask unnecessary questions, those who are informed on technical systems might ask too many questions and keep asking questions that the companies might not have an answer to. This initially took up substantial amounts of time and led NeoSmart to the decision to have an employee dedicated to answering questions. Another unfavourable effect of knowledgeable citizens is that they might be the ones to tinker with the technology when others without the technological skills would come near the battery during their day. Smart technologies are supposed to operate without anyone coming in between making it inefficient were someone to intervene.
Nevertheless, showing interest in smart technologies and being apt to tinker with these technologies are characteristics of a smart citizen. Enthusiasm about smart devices demonstrate a person’s involvement in the green energy transition. This might lead to someone being more prone to taking part in a project like the Virtual Power Plant.
From the companies’ perspective a participant needs to be informed just enough to manage basic trouble shooting regarding the battery’s operation, but not knowledgeable to the extent that they repeatedly ask questions and may tinker with a functioning battery.
Interpreting data
As mentioned before, the interpretation of smart meter data was an issue due its lack of transparency and clearness. Beside joy of the ingenious technology of the Smart Grid, there is insight – in particular the graphical representation of its performance – in the household’s consumption and production which serves as a self-reflection (Boekelo, 2017). On the one hand this includes juxtaposing one’s own perception with the data from the smart meter, occupying participants by estimating their own production through a mixture of weather, past experiences with solar panels and perceptions of energy usage and comparing this to the monitor’s statistics. On the other hand, there is self-reflexivity that shapes the awareness of the prosumers, as they can see and analyse their own energy behaviour. Being able to alter one’s own energy usage to save energy usage, is once again one of the primary motivations for taking part in this project.
Providing the prosumers with a smart meter was the first step in shaping the energy citizen to be more aware of what is happening in their in-home technologies. Nonetheless, this attempt at shaping energy citizenship was ineffective due to people not understanding the interface called Victron. Some participants pointed out that another, more common smart meter was easier to read and use. In the course of the project, the visualisation in smart meters was updated to provide a more comprehensive look at a household’s energy behaviour. Once again, the participant gatherings helped homeowners get a grasp on the Victron interface and properly read their in-home electricity patterns.
