Smart grids and the techno-material construction of an electricity consumer
Résumé
This paper seeks to engage with the workshop theme “steering demand” by drawing attention to the neoliberal agenda and its promotion of markets as a means to drive and direct demand. According to this agenda, markets are the most efficient mean to steer energy demand, provided that adequate incentives and market designs are set in place. In this approach to markets, the complex and collective sense of demand is lost, it is reduced to rational consumer behaviour.
The “smart grid” is a locus of such reconceptions of energy demand management. Smart grid shall make it easier to bring real-time signals about the grid status to the end-user. Combined with market discourses, it has given way to the idea of “demand-response” which consists in an economically-motivated (price signals) and quick-paced response of end-users to grid needs. The corresponding “responsive consumer” is a consumer amenable to price incentive who contributes to peak load shading by shifting his/her demand and uses in time.
This paper follows the controversy about the design of a tiny portion of the French smart meter. It explores how end-users are defined as electricity consumers and the agency they are endowed with. Following suit with social history and cultural theory approaches of consumption but with an ANT twist, we consider consumers as constructed figures. We examine “the making of the consumer” in a very literal sense, that of the material and technical devices through which an alleged “consumer behaviour” is inscribed.
At least three versions of the responsive consumer struggle to be inscribed in the French smart meter. Two of them convey a consumer defined by individual preferences, individual action and rational optimisation: the “energy saving consumer” (alike the “attitude, behaviour, choice” paradigm of energy efficiency [Shove]) and the (economic theory and market) “rational chooser”. The third version is the attached consumer, largely captive of elaborate market offers and marketing devices, who unwillingly relinquishes his power to suppliers (Cochoy, Trompette).
The struggle to inscribe the consumer in the meter also is a struggle to define how the market should work. We follow the way in which different theories and practices of market construction become interwoven in and around the technical design of the French smart meter and inscribe a figure of the electricity consumer in this design. Whereas the « smart grid » vision advocated in French/EU policy documents and grey literature celebrates the advent of a « smart » consumer, the process we analyse results in the decision to not directly deliver basic price information to the French electricity consumer.
This paper brings to the discussion of markets as means of steering demand a concrete case study and a critical appraisal of how markets and consumers are constructed.