This document summarizes a presentation given by Dr. Tom Roberts and Dr. Kevin Burchell about understanding energy as a social phenomenon. It discusses measuring energy consumption, developing smart communities through community engagement projects, historical conceptualizations of energy, and qualitative and folk understandings of energy units. The presentation argues that changing energy behavior requires more than just measurement, and that energy literacy should incorporate corporeal, dramatic, and kinesthetic understandings of energy beyond just quantitative metrics.

1. Electrickery
The Social Life of Energy
Dr Tom Roberts and Dr Kevin Burchell
Kingston University
Track 38 Energy, practice and personal lives: design and displacement in
the everyday - I
October 19th 2012,
Biennial Conference of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) 2012
Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark

2. Energy and measurement
•“You can’t change what you don’t measure”...
•Measurement and energy literacy is crucial but on their own are
insufficient for change
•Need to understand energy qualitatively as well as quantitatively
• Energy needs to be better understood as a social phenomenon
E=MC2
FACTS...

3. Smart Communities
• Team: Ruth Rettie, Kevin Burchell and Tom Roberts
• Community action project with the objective of energy
consumption reduction (in homes and in a school)
• Close relationship between interrelated theory and
practice (action research)
Practice theory
Social theories of learning
Social norm theory Community action
Community action theory
• Team of local project partners
• Lots of community engagement
www.smartcommunities.org.uk

4. Historical ideas of energy
Modern industrial
idea of energy
masks a much
richer past
• Corporeal energy – “Labour united the
human and animal bodies” - ‘working like a
horse’, ‘feeling his oats’, and ‘working in the
traces’ (Nye,1998)
• 1590s – Galileo’s experiments
• 1676 – Leibniz and ‘vis viva’
Dr Johnson’s dictionary in 1746
• 1807 – Thomas Young and ‘energy’ describes electricity as:
• 1840s – law of conservation of energy “A property in some bodies, whereby
• energy – from theoretical construct to when rubbed so as to grow warm, they
industrial reality draw little bits of paper, or such-like
substances to them”

5. Social classifications / folk quanta of
energy
• “Consumers measure energy using techniques that differ from those of
professional energy analysts. We refer to these informal measurement
techniques as folk quantification.” (Kempton and Montgomery, 1983)
• Petrol easier than electricity – miles per gallon a good folk quanta
• £ and p

6. I’m using how much £!?
Vampire consumption – what
bleeds away in the night

7. Comparative feedback
“Electricity yes, we’re below... the top 20%”
We’re a 50 kwh a week household

8. Social classifications / folk quanta of
energy
Oil, coal, natural gas, or water POTENTIAL TECHNOLOGY KINAESTHETIC CORPOREAL AFFECTUAL
behind a dam are all valued
primarily for their energy Making an Potential /
potential, not for the specific Wood etc
activity easier
Movement
Exhaustion
Fuel bills £
form that the matter takes. If
Miles per
we value something for its Fossil fuels Electric car Cycling Work
gallon
form, it is regarded as matter;
but if we value it for the work it Electricity
Power stations
Prancing horse Warmth Waste
can do, we call it ‘energy’
(Adams, 1988)
Forces Solar power Surfing Life force Firemaking
energy, from Greek energeia, „activity‟,
from energos, „being in action‟

9. The social life of energy
Community workshops
MPA Lighting makes me feel less lonely
in a big house? And you don’t
agree with that, lighting makes me
feel less... no?
Light
MFA Why does it, do you think, could
you elaborate, what... how does it
make you feel?
FPA Well, I think it just sort of, a
feeling of optimism with the light
on, I think, if it’s all sort of, dull
and dingy, or you know, it’s...
especially in the winter, you know,
the winter evenings, when they’re
getting dull and dark, I think if you
put a light on, it cheers you up.
MPA It cheers you up.

10. The social life of energy
Community workshops
U5 I think, also, if you’ve got something
like a log fire, just the sight of those flames
Heat
has a psychological effect to make you feel
warmer ...Yes, there is the radiant heat but I
think you get an extra boost [overtalking].
U1 The cosiness, perhaps.
U5 The fact is, that you tell yourself you
are cosy. Because [overtalking] fires, you don’t
have to get the heat from them, [overtalking] so
you look at the flames and you will feel warmer
with no heating on.

11. Visual and thermoception
Thermal imaging parties

12. What Watt?
• 8 W – human-powered equipment using a hand crank
• 14 W – power consumption of a typical household compact fluorescent light bulb
• 20–40 W – power consumption of the human brain
• 60 W – power consumption of a typical household incandescent light bulb
• 100 W – metabolic rate of an adult human body
• 120 W – electric power output of 1 m2 solar panel in full sunlight
• 130 W – peak power consumption of a Pentium 4 CPU
• 500 W – power output (useful work plus heat) of a person working hard physically
• 745.7 W – units: 1 horsepower
• 750 W – amount of sunshine falling on a square metre of the Earth's surface
• kilowatt (103 watts)
• 1 kW to 3 kW – heat output of a domestic electric kettle
• 1.1 kW – power of a microwave oven
• 10.0 kW (87,216 kWh/year) – average power consumption per person in the US (2008)
• 16–32 kW – average photosynthetic power output per square kilometer
• 40 kW to 200 kW – approximate range of power output of typical automobiles
• 450 kW – approximate maxi power output of a large lorry
• megawatt (106 watts)
• 1.5 MW – peak power output of GE's standard wind turbine
• 2.5 MW – peak power output of a blue whale
• 3 MW – mechanical power output of a diesel locomotive
• 12.2 MW – approx power available to a Eurostar 20-carriage train

13. Kinesthetics: what do watts feel
like?
‘... kinaesthetic investments (such as walking, bicycling, riding a
train or being in a car) orient us toward the material affordances of
the world around us in particular ways, and these orientations
generate emotional geographies’ (Sheller 2005)

14. Getting Ed Davey MP (Secretary of State for Energy
and Climate Change and Zac Goldsmith MP to
generate some power

15. Energy at school
• Working with estates manager
– ecodriver
– Environmental audit
• Curriculum
– ecodriver
– Homework
• School life
– Ecodriver/energy-o-meter
– Energy enforcer
– Green cup

16. Drama: the energy collector
“Imagine what would happen if
someone came along and took away all
the energy in the world...”
Once upon a time, a cloud shape ship hovered
over Earth. The ship belonged to The Energy
Collector, a small but terrifying man...
http://www.energycollector.org/part1.html

17. Conclusions
1. Folk quanta important to behavioural
change agenda. Not just a case of more
and better measurement
2. Broader notion of energy literacy
required
3. Corporeal, kinesthetic and dramatic can
be powerful tools of engagement

18. Thank you!
Dr Tom Roberts and Dr Kevin Burchell
t.roberts@kingston.ac.uk
www.smartcommunities.org.uk