Smart energopower: Energy,work and waste within a UK smart grid trial

Abstract

In The Birth of Energy (2019), Cara New Daggett offers an incisive critique of the dominant thermodynamic concept of energy. ‘Energy’, Daggett shows, is inextricably tied to an exploitative productivist politics that extols the virtues of work and the sins of waste. In this paper, I seek to develop new conversations between Daggett's account in The Birth of Energy and an important empirical development within the energy industry that Daggett herself does not consider: the smart grid. The paper draws upon a mixed-methods research project, investigating a UK smart grid trial called ‘OpenDSR’ devised and implemented by Manchester-based co-operative Carbon Co-op, with funding from the UK government. I draw on my research within OpenDSR to make two interconnected arguments. Firstly, I argue that the smart grid sees an intensification of the energy-as-work logic that Daggett opposes, taking pre-existing preoccupations with calculation and measurement within the energy system to new extremes in pursuit of the maximisation of efficiency and the minimisation of waste. I then proceed to think through the political implications of this argument, contending that while the smart grid reproduces the dominant energy logic that Daggett critiques, it might still have a part to play within an emancipatory environmental politics. In making this claim, a second argument emerges, constituting a sympathetic critique of Daggett's account more broadly. Daggett offers an incisive and important contribution that does much to develop debates within the energy social sciences and humanities. However, I suggest that her account risks obscuring some important political differences between variegated forms of work and waste: while she makes a persuasive case for an anti-work conceptualisation of energy that portends liberation from waged labour, her analysis of the kinds of ‘efficiency’ that pertain to the energy system seems less compelling.

Introduction

In her (2019) book The Birth of Energy, political theorist Cara New Daggett offers an illuminating genealogy of the modern concept of energy, tracing this back to the 19th century and the emergence of thermodynamics as an influential scientific theory. In doing so, Daggett shows that far from an innocent and impartial scientific discovery, the thermodynamic concept of energy cannot be divorced from the desires of Britain's early industrial capitalists to understand, monitor and discipline the work of both humans and machines. Indeed, Daggett's argument is that this dominant concept of energy has played an important ideological role in the reproduction of capitalism and imperialism, being used to lend scientific legitimacy to a violent and hierarchical productivist politics that extols the virtues of work and the sins of waste. Accordingly, Daggett's contention is that an emancipatory environmental politics requires new conceptualisations of energy. Her own alternative is a vision of ‘energy freedom’ informed by a feminist anti-work politics. She writes:

Rather than energy efficiency, which reinforces the bond between energy and the work ethic, what if we posit energy freedom? Energy freedom—by which I mean an attempt to free more energy from the strictures of waged, productive work—would short-circuit the dominant logic of energy and its assumption that freedom is equivalent to a nation's industrial capacity for maximum fuel independence. (p. 204)

In this paper, I seek to develop new conversations between Daggett's account in The Birth of Energy and an important empirical development within the energy industry that Daggett herself does not consider: the smart grid. The concept of the smart grid is used to denote an array of significant socio-technical changes within the electricity system, largely driven by endeavours to integrate increasing quantities of ‘variable’ renewable electricity generating capacity. Solar and wind power are ‘variable’ in ways that fossil fuels are not, given that generation from solar and wind is contingent upon fluctuations in the weather, climate, seasons and time of day. Therefore, as solar and wind increase their share of electricity generating capacity, matching supply and demand becomes more complicated – whereas large fossil fuel power stations can be planned to ‘peak’ at times when demand will usually be highest, it is impossible to plan when the sun will shine and the wind will blow. Smart grids are at the heart of the energy industry's solution to this predicament, providing a means of making demand more ‘flexible’, meaning that electricity consumption practices can be shifted in accordance with the fluctuating rhythms of variable renewable generation. This flexibility is achieved through various ICT technologies such as smart metres and smart appliances. These technologies facilitate the flow of data between electricity users, utility firms and grid operators, and enable ‘demand-side response’ (DSR) initiatives that seek to shift electricity users’ consumption practices via financial incentives.

While both scholars and activists have, in recent years, devoted considerable attention to progressive visions of energy transition, often deploying lenses of energy democracy (Angel, 2016, 2017; Becker and Naumann, 2017; Becker et al., 2019; Burke and Stephens, 2017) and energy justice (Hornborg, 2020; Jenkins et al., 2016; Sovacool and Dworkin, 2015) to do so, there has been little thought devoted to the place of the smart grid within these visions. This paper attempts to develop this line of thinking and to show that Daggett can be a helpful interlocutor in doing so.

The paper draws upon a mixed-methods research project, investigating a UK smart grid trial called OpenDSR. OpenDSR was an initiative devised and implemented by Manchester-based non-profit co-operative organisation Carbon Co-op, with funding from the UK government Department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS). Beginning in January 2018 and concluding in July 2021, OpenDSR sought to investigate the technical and commercial viability of a newly developed technological system for demand-side response, based on open source, open standards and interoperable technologies. I joined the OpenDSR project as an academic partner between January and June 2021, supporting with the project's monitoring and evaluation while simultaneously gathering data for my own independent research. The primary method deployed was a series of 34 semi-structured interviews (29 with project participants and 5 with Carbon Co-op staff members) conducted remotely via Zoom due to the COVID-19 pandemic. These remote interviews were supplemented by participant observation (also conducted remotely via Zoom) at Carbon Co-op team meetings and webinars organised for project participants, alongside an online survey completed by 40 project participants, comprising both open-ended qualitative and closed quantitative questions.

In what follows, I draw on my research within the OpenDSR project to make two interconnected arguments. Firstly, I argue that the smart grid sees an intensification of the energy-as-work logic that Daggett opposes via the construction of what I term ‘smart energopower’. Smart energopower takes pre-existing preoccupations with calculation and measurement within the energy system to new extremes in pursuit of the maximisation of efficiency and the minimisation of waste via new smart energy technologies. I then proceed to think through the political implications of this argument, contending that while the smart grid reproduces the dominant energy logic that Daggett critiques, it might still have a part to play within an emancipatory environmental politics. In making this claim, a second argument emerges, constituting a sympathetic critique of Daggett's account more broadly. Daggett offers an incisive and important contribution that does much to develop debates within the energy social sciences and humanities. However, I suggest that her account risks obscuring some important political differences between variegated forms of work and waste: while she makes a persuasive case for an anti-productivist conceptualisation of energy that portends liberation from waged labour, her analysis of the kinds of ‘efficiency’ that pertain to the energy system seems less compelling.

The paper begins by clarifying Daggett's genealogical critique of the modern concept of energy, before putting this into conversation with debates around the smart grid. Next, I contextualise and explain the OpenDSR project and proceed to think through my experiences of OpenDSR through the lens of Daggett's account. A final section then draws out conclusions for studies of the smart grid, and for the political ecology of energy more broadly.

Thermodynamics and its discontents

Energy is an increasingly important subject of enquiry for political ecologists, especially in light of the ecological crisis threatened by the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels and the subsequent need to transition to renewable energy sources. Political ecologists have traditionally treated energy as a resource, discussing conflicts around the ownership, transportation and usage of particular fuels (e.g. Bridge, 2010; 2013; Watts, 2004). Energy infrastructures have also provided a fruitful terrain of political ecological enquiry, with the likes of gas and electricity grids, pipelines and metres approached as ‘cyborg’ devices (Gandy, 2005; Haraway, 1991) bringing together the social and the technical, the material and the representational (e.g. Baptista, 2015; Barry, 2013; Mitchell, 2011; Silver, 2015). Recent contributions have turned their attention to the ‘new political ecologies of renewable energy’, highlighting issues such as associated shifts in land usage, industrial processes, material politics and questions of ‘just transition’ (Knuth et al., 2022). Rather than treating energy resources and infrastructures as assets or things, relational ontologies of energy have become commonplace within political ecology (Calvert, 2016; Huber, 2015): resources and infrastructures are conceptualised as socio-ecological relations, which is to say that their ‘biophysical capacities only come to be mobilised in specific historical circumstances and through particular social relations’ (Huber, 2013: 4).

Energy geographer Gustav Cederlöf (2019) has recently argued that this relational approach must be expanded to incorporate energy's thermodynamic properties. The laws of thermodynamics, first posited by 19th-century physicists, make two claims. The first law, often referred to as the law of conservation, states that energy can only ever be transformed from one form to another – energy cannot be destroyed. The second law establishes the phenomenon of entropy: when energy is transformed from one form to another, its quality or orderliness declines. Cederlöf argues that a thermodynamic approach to energy has important implications for political ecology, establishing that social life is premised upon ‘ecologically unequal exchange’, a process through which low-entropy energy is shifted from one place to another, usually facilitated by violence and dispossession. As such, Cederlöf's contention is that political ecology as a discipline can be re-conceptualised as ‘a field that studies how political, economic, and social relations shape and are shaped by energy systems, which co-constitute the ecological conditions of human life.’ (p. 71)

Daggett, however, takes conversations between political ecology and thermodynamics in a quite different direction to that suggested by Cederlöf, arguing that the laws of thermodynamics themselves need to be subject to careful political ecological interrogation. Although thermodynamics is now the dominant approach to energy across the natural sciences, Daggett shows that the laws of thermodynamics have often been treated with a degree of caution within the scientific community. Writing in 1941, for example, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Percy Bridgman commented: ‘the laws of thermodynamics have a different feel from most of the other laws of physics. There is something more palpably verbal about them—they smell more of their human origin’ (cited in: Daggett, 2019: 39). It is precisely the ‘human origin’ of thermodynamics that Daggett seeks to unpack, focusing on the 19th-century Glaswegian physicists responsible for developing the discipline of thermodynamics and their connections to their city's rapidly growing industries. Glasgow's factory owners were at this time determined to understand and minimise the inefficiencies of the steam engines that had become so central to their business operations. The steam engine appeared to hold considerable promise for the profitability of Britain's burgeoning industries, given its advantages over unpredictable and unruly human labour. However, Glasgow's industrial capitalists quickly became preoccupied with the waste that appeared to be inherent within the process of converting coal into motion, alongside the question of why this process seemed to be irreversible such that motion is incapable of producing coal out of ash.

Attempting to answer these perplexing questions, scientists such as William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin), William John Macquorn Rankine and Peter Guthrie Tait developed the thermodynamic concept of energy as ‘the ability to do work’. Heat can be converted into motion, they argued, because both represent manifestations of some shared phenomenon called ‘energy’, whose overall quantity remains constant over time. This process is irreversible, they contended, because of the law of entropy, which establishes declining quality and orderliness as an unavoidable consequence of energy's transformation. Yet the laws of thermodynamics, Daggett argues, were more a matter of ideological abstraction than empirical discovery. As renowned physicist Richard Feynman (2011) has argued, the law of conservation gives us ‘no knowledge of what energy is’ (p. 43) Describing this law, Feynman writes:

That is a most abstract idea, because it is a mathematical principle; it says that there is a numerical quantity which does not change when something happens. It is not a description of a mechanism, or anything concrete; it is just a strange fact that we can calculate some number and when we finish watching nature go through her tricks and calculate the number again, it is the same. (p. 41)

For Daggett, the theory of Kelvin and his collaborators was inescapably tinged by their Presbyterian faith. Prior to beginning their energy experiments, they were committed to the idea of God as a universal and constant life-giving force – a notion that they ended up reproducing in the concept of energy as an abstraction that cannot be created or destroyed. What's more, they were committed to an ethical schema that celebrated work and condemned waste, idleness and sloth: the concept of entropy ended up lending a scientific justification to the Protestant work ethic, with the prospect of entropic decline thought to render efficiency and thrift more important than ever before.

Accordingly, thermodynamics became a science of work and waste, with the concept of energy deployed in order to compare the productivity and (in)efficiency of fuel, machines and labouring bodies. This called for intensive regimes of calculation, monitoring and measurement seeking to render the energetic qualities of both humans and non-humans as knowable, controllable and, crucially, as amenable to the extraction of value as possible. With energy established as an important disciplinary idea within British capitalism, it was soon exported overseas to legitimise imperialism. Daggett exposes the deployment of an ‘energetic racism’ juxtaposing the purported productivity and resourcefulness of white European colonisers with the ‘laziness’ and ‘idleness’ of racialised African and Native American subjects.

Daggett draws on and develops Dominic Boyer's (2019) concept of ‘energopower’ to condense her argument, using this concept to describe a political rationality premised upon the governance of work and waste in pursuit of profit. Disturbing this governmental logic and the violence and exploitation it reproduces, Daggett argues, can be achieved only by troubling the dominant thermodynamic concept of energy and by advancing alternative energy epistemologies. The Birth of Energy concludes with one attempt at doing so, anchored in a vision of what Daggett terms ‘energy freedom’, premised upon diverting energy usage away from ‘productive’ work and waged labour and towards enjoyable leisure activities. The feminist post-work politics articulated by Kathi Weeks (2011) provides a generative foundation for this vision. Weeks's demands such as a universal basic income and a shorter working week, Daggett suggests, could provide the basis for an emancipatory environmentalism that promises pleasure and joy instead of the asceticism and thrift traditionally associated with environmental movements.

Might, then, the smart grid experiments touted as necessary in transitions to variable renewable energy open up possibilities for this kind of energy freedom? Or might, instead, they consolidate the thermodynamic concept of energy-as-work? This is the question I seek to explore in the rest of the paper. To begin to do so, I now move on to review existing encounters with the smart grid from within the energy social sciences and humanities.

Theorising the smart grid

The majority of the pre-existing scholarly literature on the smart grid offers purely technical analyses seeking to inform engineering, economic modelling and policy-making. That said, a number of notable exceptions develop a more sociotechnical understanding of the smart grid and illuminate its political, economic and social constitution and implications.

Urban scholars, for example, have interrogated smart energy technologies within attempts to understand the role of discourses and practices of the ‘smart city’ in the reconfiguration of urban life. Bulkeley et al. (2016a) argue that smart grids represent one way that the smart cities imaginary is being enacted in practice, illustrating that the materialities of the urban fabric are both constitutive of and constituted by smart electricity systems. Sharing this focus on the co-constitution of smart energy and the urban, Levenda (2018) positions the smart grid as instituting a form of urban energy governance that constrains the capacity of citizens to participate in and shape urban energy policy. Levenda (2019) extends this argument, contending that smart grid experiments are enrolled in entrepreneurial modalities of urban governance, which seek to constrain citizen participation in urban life to the realm of individual consumption. Similarly, Quitzow and Rohde (2021) suggest that dominant narratives of the smart grid, which position this as necessary for a more sustainable, economically successful and liveable city, draw on the claims and interests of a small community of ‘experts’, foreclosing the development of more radical and inclusive visions of urban change.

In both of the contributions by Bulkeley et al. and Levenda discussed above, a Foucauldian lens is deployed to make sense of the urban smart grid. This Foucauldian approach has been adopted across a range of other accounts of the smart grid from beyond urban studies. Bulkeley et al. (2016b) draw on Foucault's concept of governmentality – the conduct of conduct – to argue that the smart grid redefines what constitutes ‘good’ energy conduct. The goal of the smart grid, on this view, is to create new self-policing subjects who rework everyday social practices in ways that help maximise the integration of variable renewable energy resources into the grid. Levenda et al. (2015), meanwhile, use Foucault's later writings on neoliberalism (Foucault, 2010) to critique the smart grid's role in the production of neoliberal subjectivities. This is because the demand-side response schemes enabled by the smart grid entrench electricity users’ positioning as market actors encouraged to maximise financial gains via intensive monitoring and rationalisation of their consumption practices.

Contemporary smart grid schemes, however, are often less premised upon individual consumer agency than automation and third-party interventions – instead of consumers themselves being tasked with the burden of ensuring good energy conduct, many more recent initiatives see consumers asked to surrender control of their devices and consumption practices to allow machines and industry actors to orchestrate their conduct remotely. For Sadowski and Levenda (2020), the result of this shift to more automated forms of energy governance is the elimination of normative political discussion within the energy system. As such, they argue that smart energy regimes enact a logic of anti-politics, which sees social, political and ethical questions give way to a purely economic rationality. Chandrashekeran (2020) argues that this shift to automation has taken place due to the accumulation strategies of large energy firms. As such, she makes the case for a political economy theorisation of the smart grid attentive to market design, regulation, ownership and relationships between the state and industry. This political economy focus is shared by Angel (2022), who argues that the energy system flexibility pursued by smart grid schemes constitutes a socio-ecological fix for capital, in the face of the limits to accumulation presented by the concrete spatiotemporalities of variable renewable electricity.

By drawing attention to the place of smart energy schemes within the political economy of capitalism, these aforementioned contributions raise questions of justice and injustice within smart energy debates. These questions have been addressed explicitly by a number of scholars. Milchram et al. (2018) argue that while smart grids have the potential to facilitate more equitable access to energy systems, there is a risk that their benefits will be enjoyed only by those able to afford household smart energy technologies, in turn exacerbating socio-economic inequalities – a risk also identified by Powells and Fell (2019) and Sareen (2021). Johnson (2020) shows that the potential injustices of the smart grid are also gendered: with household energy management typically gendered as ‘women's work’, her research investigating a smart energy trial in the East London borough of Tower Hamlets shows that the burden of shifting domestic social practices to provide flexibility tended to fall disproportionately on women.

Johnson's argument is informed by social practice theory, which seeks to ground analysis of the energy system in the specific social practices of energy consumption (Walker and Shove, 2014). In particular, Johnson draws on Strengers’ (2013) study of the reconfiguration of social practices within the home via smart energy technologies. These technologies, Strengers argues, mediate a utopian vision within which technology and data order, rationalise and enhance domestic life, in turn creating the new subject of ‘Resource Man’, ‘a technologically interested, educated and informed resource manager of the home’ (p.8) imagined in the image of the masculine patriarchal provider. The move towards smart energy technologies, then, reconfigures the relationship between energy and gender – a relationship analysed by Daggett (2018) in her work outside of The Birth of Energy via the concept of ‘petro-masculinity’. Daggett argues that masculine tropes of domination, violence, strength and hardness have been shaped through the material and ideological mobilisation of fossil fuel extraction and high-intensity consumption. While the shift from petro-masculinity to Resource Man perhaps portends a more ethically and ecologically conscious masculinity, hierarchical gendered power relations are maintained.

This utopian vision of Resource Man is further unpicked by Özden-Schilling (2021), whose focus shifts away from the social practices of energy consumers to the work culture of smart grid engineers. This work culture, Özden-Schilling argues, values ‘optimisation’ above all else, with the electrical engineers designing smart grids preoccupied with the question of how supply and demand can best be matched with as little waste and inefficiency as possible. While Özden-Schilling demonstrates that this culture of optimisation is historically specific to the smart grid era, the pursuit of system-wide efficiencies in matching supply and demand is, in fact, nothing new. Indeed, this imperative, often referred to as ‘balancing’ the grid, has always been a crucial issue within the planning and development of modern electricity systems. If the electricity supply falls short of demand, then the result will be outages and power cuts. On the other hand, if too much electricity is supplied to the grid, this risks overburdening grid infrastructures such as cables and wires – alongside the problem of money and resources being wasted on generating electricity that is not needed. Accordingly, core texts within energy history such as Nye (1990) and Hirsh (1999) show that the utility firms that advanced electrification in the US context did so with the question of balancing the grid at the forefront of their thinking. Nye and Hirsh illustrate that utilities have always sought markets and consumers that help ‘flatten’ demand, avoiding dramatic peaks and troughs to make grid balancing as straightforward as possible.

As variable renewable electricity sources take on an increasing role in the energy mix, energy supply becomes more intermittent and unpredictable. Part of the thinking behind the smart grid is that balancing the grid in the context of increasing unpredictability and intermittency of supply can be achieved through demand-side interventions, in particular, measures that (a) reduce demand and (b) make demand more ‘flexible’. As such, the smart grid maps onto the pursuit of two related but distinct forms of energy efficiency. Firstly, smart devices that enable more accurate and granular measurement and monitoring of household energy usage are designed to help increase what we might think of as household energy efficiency, that is, the reduction of a household's energy consumption. Secondly, smart grid projects like OpenDSR premised upon household demand flexibility seek to foster efficiencies at a system-wide level. The theory here is that demand flexibility heralds an alternative trajectory to that of significant investment in new ‘baseload’ generating capacity, that is, fossil fuel generating assets that can be fired up to meet surges in demand when variable renewable sources are unavailable. Whereas relying on baseload coal or gas power stations can be seen as representing wasted financial investments, wasted resources and wasted carbon emissions, industry sources represent demand flexibility as a means of optimising the usage of pre-existing grid infrastructures and maximising efficiencies within the system.

In this paper, I want to draw on my research within OpenDSR to show that the pursuit of these forms of efficiency within the energy sector – alongside the desire to minimise wasted money and wasted carbon emissions – has a clear resonance with the governmental logic of energopower described by Daggett, which associates dominant conceptualisations of energy with the denunciation of waste and the veneration of work. I will argue that OpenDSR prefigures what we might think of as smart energopower: the deployment of smart energy technologies in order to maximise efficiency and minimise waste. Before going on to make this argument, the next section contextualises and sets out the thinking behind the OpenDSR project.

OpenDSR: Towards the co-operative smart grid

The UK government first set out a vision and roadmap for a transition towards a smart electricity grid in 2014, in a report co-authored with UK energy market regulator Ofgem (HM Government and Ofgem, 2014). The report has been followed by a number of subsequent policy documents (Ofgem 2019; Ofgem and HM |Government 2017, 2018) alongside funding streams for smart grid trials and demonstrator projects that seek to facilitate experimentation and innovation around smart grids from within the energy industry. Carbon Co-op’s OpenDSR project was one of several initiatives funded by the UK government’s Department of Business Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) via their ‘Innovative Domestic Demand Side Response Competition’. OpenDSR took place across two phases, with the first phase (January 2018–July 2018) constituted by an initial feasibility study, followed by a second phase (January 2019–June 2021) in which the technical system at the core of the project was designed and put into practice in a trial project.

The core component of this technical system is a ‘Home Energy Management System’ (HEMS) box, which receives data from a smart EV charger and smart immersion heater controller. The HEMS box can put this data to use in several ways. Firstly, it allows users to monitor the operation of their smart EV chargers and smart heater controllers in greater depth than a standard smart metre would allow. Additionally, users can programme their smart chargers and controllers via the HEMS box, for instance, to set these to come on at a particular time of day. Finally, the HEMS box can communicate with Carbon Co-op technicians via the internet. The idea here is that the smart EV chargers and smart immersion controllers, once installed in households, can be remotely switched off by Carbon Co-op technicians as part of demand-side response ‘events’. As such, should this system come to market, it would allow the electricity consumption of multiple households to be coordinated remotely by a third-party actor such as Carbon Co-op. The goal of doing this is to render households as providers of electricity system flexibility. At present, the UK’s electricity grid operators (both the operator of the high voltage transmission network National Grid, alongside the multiple firms operating lower voltage distribution networks) procure flexibility via a number of different competing market platforms. While individual households can, in theory, participate in these flexibility markets, the amount of flexibility any one household can provide is relatively insignificant and, thus, in practice there is no reason for grid operators to procure flexibility from households in this way. The OpenDSR system ultimately seeks to become the basis of what Carbon Co-op call a ‘Community Energy Aggregator’ model, which would allow a third-party organisation like Carbon Co-op to ‘aggregate’ the flexibility that multiple households can provide and to sell this flexibility on to grid operators.

Carbon Co-op recruited 42 volunteer participants from across England to join the OpenDSR demonstrator project: participants were recruited from Carbon Co-op’s own membership, the membership of other UK community energy organisations and social media forums for electric vehicle owners. While some of these participants were from Manchester and the north-west of England – the city and region where Carbon Co-op themselves are based – many lived elsewhere, meaning that the demonstrator was not based within any specific locality. All participants owned an EV and/or an electric immersion heater as a condition of entry, as these devices were necessary to test out the OpenDSR technical system. Participants were offered voucher incentives in return for their participation. Moreover, Open DSR smart EV chargers, smart immersion controllers and HEMS boxes were installed without cost in participants’ homes, which participants were then free to keep afterwards, representing another incentive to aid recruitment. The demonstrator was publicly branded to participants as PowerShaper, the hope being that the demonstrator could be used to recruit participants to a longer-term project extended beyond the BEIS-funded scheme. Indeed, while the OpenDSR project is now completed, many OpenDSR participants continue to participate in the next stage of PowerShaper, a household energy monitoring program being developed with European Union Horizon 2020 funding.

What distinguished OpenDSR from other similar demand-side response and energy aggregation innovation projects is a unique ethos and set of guiding principles. Carbon Co-op, as its name suggests, is a cooperative organisation owned and governed by their members, run on a non-profit basis. Founded in Manchester in 2011, the organisation provides services and advocacy around community renewable energy and household energy efficiency and retrofit. Carbon Co-op’s organisational goals include environmental justice, collective action and common ownership (Carbon Co-op 2021) and they have a long-standing interest in the potential of open-source technologies in helping to realise these goals. They have attempted to integrate these values into OpenDSR in various ways. Firstly, Carbon Co-op purposefully designed a technical system that seeks to avoid propriety ownership and can be replicated easily by others. To do so, they adopted the following as technical aims:

Interoperability: the project only deploys software and hardware that can communicate with any other system, ensuring that users do not get locked into any one approach or brand

Open source: the project uses software whose source code is freely available to be used and adapted by others

Open standards: technologies deployed within the project can be copied, distributed and used freely by others

Off-the-shelf hardware: all technologies deployed within the project were pre-existing devices readily available to others

In addition to these technical aims, Carbon Co-op endeavoured to maximise opportunities for participation. Webinars, focus groups and an online participant forum were organised to give project participants the chance to shape the project, share knowledge and build community.

Finally, the Community Energy Aggregator model that the trial ultimately hopes to inspire is motivated by a desire to shift power relations within the UK smart energy sector. At present, the major players in this sector are large utility and technology firms whose primary interest is in creating new opportunities to profit from sociotechnical change. This is currently true of those designing and developing new smart energy technologies. What's more, Ian, a Carbon Co-op staff member, told me that he feared that these firms could quickly come to dominate the household flexibility aggregation space as well. Tesla, for example, recently launched an aggregator scheme that sees Tesla electrical vehicle and battery owners offered a reduction in their household energy bills in return for offering the firm remote control of their household assets, allowing Tesla to profit from flexibility markets by selling on the flexibility these EV owners provide. Ian commented:

How much money is Tesla making from your asset, your car and your battery, how fair is it? What is their margin? I mean, they could be making, I don't know, 40 percent profit on your battery… I can see a huge appeal to companies to do this because they can effectively hide what they're doing with your stuff behind very attractive upfront benefit.

Ian explained that he hoped OpenDSR might prefigure an alternative vision in which cooperatives become major players in flexibility markets. The thinking here is that if cooperatives like Carbon Co-op become aggregators of household flexibility, the revenues they generate can be democratically governed by and distributed to their members, rather than extracted to provide shareholder value for the likes of Tesla. He explained:

So it's sort of in some ways a very traditional, like, co-operative model. Because you have a load of people with shared interests coming together, contributing their economic means and sharing in the benefits of that in doing something which they wouldn't be able to achieve on their own necessarily.

The co-operative model Ian describes here is that of a consumer co-operative: an organisation that is democratically owned and controlled by individuals with the purpose of meeting a common consumption need. The first consumer co-operative emerged in Rochdale, England in the 1840s, close to Carbon Co-op's own city of Manchester. The ‘Rochdale Pioneers’ sought to provide good quality and cheap food to its members, artisans working in cotton mills. Food co-operatives have gone on to become perhaps the dominant form of consumer co-operative and are now commonplace across the world. For Gibson-Graham (2006), the prevalence of this kind of organisation portends a radical ‘post-capitalist’ politics, evidencing the prevalence of economic organisations departing from private profit as their organising principle. However, in his study of US food co-operatives, Zitcer (2015) argues that food co-operatives are often highly exclusive, often pricing out working class consumers and benefiting a relatively homogenous white membership.

As such, while OpenDSR was underpinned by a progressive vision for increased transparency, participation and equity within the smart grid sector, the history and present-day reality of consumer cooperatives in sectors beyond energy illuminate the need for careful interrogation of the actually existing practices of this kind of organisation. In what follows, I hope to make clear the potential of this vision while at the same time asking questions as to the ways in which OpenDSR and other smart grid projects might reproduce or challenge the governmental logic of thermodynamic energy identified by Daggett.

Smart energopower

Previously in the paper, I drew a tentative connection between the efficiencies pursued by the smart grid and the political rationality of energopower identified by Daggett, which associates the concept of energy to the promotion of work and the condemnation of waste. In this section, I want to explore the ways in which my experiences of the OpenDSR smart grid trial give some weight to this association: how might the move towards smart energy portend the smartening of energopower? One of the most striking common threads I identified in my attempt to understand the motivations, beliefs and subjectivities of the OpenDSR participants I interviewed was a shared pursuit of efficiency. Efficiency, here, meant different things to different people. In what follows, I argue that OpenDSR participants pursued the minimisation of wasted money, wasted energy and wasted carbon. In doing so, I suggest that participants subtly inscribed the kind of energetically inspired moral hierarchies that Daggett associates with energopower.

Wasted money

For some OpenDSR participants, the primary interest was in maximising financial cost-savings and, in turn, avoiding wasted money. Graham, a retired London taxi driver now living in South Yorkshire, explained his rationale for purchasing rooftop solar panels, telling me frankly: ‘I'm not going to say I'm a green warrior, and the only reason I spent 10 grand was to help save the world.’ He continued:

I've always been interested in having solar panels as a concept, mainly as a money saving exercise. But they've always seemed to me to be very restricted on how long it's going to take to refund what you're spending out, because obviously the initial expense is quite, quite high. I stumbled across a company called Social Energy who do energy trading off the battery we've got installed upstairs, which in theory greatly shortens the payback time… And they're quite unique because they treat each house as a mini substation, so they do grid balancing off the battery we've got upstairs. So we get paid for grid balancing and as well as for exporting.

Graham, then, has arranged a somewhat complex household energy system including solar panels, battery storage and an arrangement with smart energy firm Social Energy in pursuit of maximising financial returns from his household energy investments, rendering his home as a ‘mini substation’.

Many trial participants procured their household energy from UK energy firm Octopus's smart tariff, named ‘Agile’. Rather than offering a fixed price per kilowatt hour as is conventional, prices on this tariff change every 30 minutes in accordance with fluctuations in the electricity wholesale market. Participants on this tariff often told me about their preoccupation with monitoring changing prices in order to reduce their energy bills as much as possible. Daniel, a project manager for a large multinational bank, said:

When you're on Agile, the prices are announced at half past four. So you're constantly on your iPad waiting for the prices to come out for the next day to work out when you can do different things… You can just change your settings and your heating and change your lifestyle to, you know, start the washer at four o'clock in the morning and the dishwasher at four o'clock in the morning… And I'll be honest, I'm into the financials of it, as much as I am into the carbon offset, doing the right thing, perspective.

Daniel and Graham's comments seem to resonate with the argument of Levenda et al.'s (2015) in relation to the role of the smart grid in the production of neoliberal market subjects. For Daniel, Graham and a number of other OpenDSR participants, smart energy technologies were approached through the lens of financial optimisation, the goal being to better their financial position via the strategic deployment of these technologies within the home. While the majority of participants came from financially comfortable middle-class backgrounds, and while the cost-savings at stake rarely exceeded a few hundred pounds, smart energy came to mediate a financial thriftiness for these individuals. Here, we see the smart grid reproducing the forms of domestic entrepreneurialism discussed by Huber (2013), in relation to the ‘hostile private’ regime of social reproduction that came to characterise post-WW2 capitalism in the US, enabled by the plentiful supply of cheap oil. Oil, Huber argues, enabled the atomised and privatised forms of transportation, housing and domestic consumer goods that came to characterise the so-called ‘American Way of Life’, dissipating pre-existing relations of social solidarity and consolidating the hegemony of the bounded family unit, managed as a competitive market actor. For some OpenDSR participants, homes were managed as businesses in the way that Huber describes, with smart energy technologies opening up new opportunities for domestic entrepreneurialism. The economic thriftiness that ensues becomes one dimension of smart energopower.

Wasted energy

Other OpenDSR participants, however, felt uncomfortable with this emphasis on personal financial gain, instead prioritising environmental goals. Some participants – particularly those who worked in the energy industry – shared a sophisticated understanding of the ways in which OpenDSR could help contribute to balancing the grid. These participants were passionate about the role that household demand flexibility could play in helping match supply and demand across the system. Some expressed hope in Carbon Co-op's vision that OpenDSR might soon scale up to become a project that played an important role in supporting the grid to integrate more variable renewable energy generating capacity while minimising the need for additional ‘baseload’ fossil fuel generation. Environmental consultant Julie was one of those who shared this motivation for joining the project. In her words:

The reason I wanted to do it [join the OpenDSR demonstrator] is I thought it's nice to be part of something like that… As I've got electric car, it seemed well I can contribute to that, right. So it was that simple. And I knew it was for the bigger picture because I know these projects are very much at the early stages. But ultimately the goal is to balance the grid and be a bit more effective overall in our energy use. So it seemed a nice thing to be part of it at a global level as well.

While most participants were aware of the system-wide efficiencies that OpenDSR pursued, many seemed to be more motivated and interested in maximising the efficiency of their household energy consumption. For this group, participation in OpenDSR constituted one of several household interventions introduced to reduce energy consumption – extensive retrofits and ‘passivhaus’ renovations were commonplace amongst the participant base, as was the deployment of smart devices and energy monitoring gadgets with the goal of cutting energy usage. Accordingly, many of these participants’ main interest in OpenDSR was the potential of the HEMS box to give them access to more granular and detailed data on their electricity usage and to allow them to programme their smart devices in ways that helped them minimise their consumption. A frequent deployment of the HEMS box, for example, was to programme smart immersion heaters in the most efficient way possible – whereas usually these heaters would heat up over a certain time interval during the night, a number of OpenDSR participants studied the operation of their heater via the HEMS box to determine its optimal heat up time and programmed their device accordingly, ensuring that only the absolute minimum electricity was used in the process.

Daniel discussed the pleasure he gains from monitoring and planning his household energy consumption in this kind of way:

Give me a spreadsheet and I'm happy, yeah. You know, I can tell you how much the solar panels have generated every month for the last nine years. I can tell you how much electric we use in the house. I can tell you how much gas we use. Yeah. So I am I am a project manager. That's, that's my job.

Daniel described the extent of this monitoring and its impacts to me, drawing out a link between information and behaviour change:

So the cars, when they do get charged, will get charged up between 1.30 and 6.30 in the morning, which is the cheap period of time that I’ve got. And you do that at 5p, why would I pay 13p during the rest of the day? You start wanting that information, you get the information and then that drives a difference in behaviour. I realised one of the lights in the lounge was an old-style bulb because I was sat there watching it turn on and it went up 60Watts. And it's like, what? I thought it was a 4Watt LED and it wasn’t, I must have changed it at some point and picked up the wrong bulb.

Daniel's comments illustrate the ways in which smart energy technologies such as the HEMS box allow users to observe and plan energy consumption in great depth, with the goal of maximising household energy efficiencies. There is a clear resonance with the governmental logic of energopower described by Daggett, which deploys extensive regimes of calculation and measurement in order to make the world knowable in new ways and, in turn, to maximise work and minimise waste.

Wasted carbon

More environmentally driven OpenDSR participants, then, pursued energy efficiencies at both the household and system-wide levels. Most of these participants, as well as seeking to avoid wasted energy, had a broader interest in minimising their personal environmental footprints and, in particular, avoiding wasted carbon. Ryan, a mechanical engineer, demonstrated this kind of logic in his explanation of his enthusiasm about electric vehicles as being rooted in the potential to save carbon:

So [before buying an EV] it very much felt like tackling climate change, it felt like this is more like something that large industry should be tackling kind of thing, you know, the power stations and the large energy users and the transport networks. Well, I've been shocked, actually, by how much carbon I've saved. I did do a good calculation, I think it was since I switched to an EV in 2018, I'd done something like the 38,000 miles, which is something like 400 tons of carbon or something like that. You know, you suddenly realise, oh yeah, okay, it does make sense.

For healthcare professional Pete, this logic of environmental optimisation was explicitly articulated around the concept of waste. Discussing his motivation for participating in OpenDSR, he said:

I've felt environmental guilt for a long time. So I think that's one of the main reasons we kind of got involved [in OpenDSR]… And I just, I hate waste. That's the main thing. I just hate waste… It's more around just kind of feeling like you're doing a bit of contributing towards helping us have a planet that doesn't have floods and famine and, you know, scorching hot weather and sun on the same day.

For individuals like Pete and Ryan, participation in OpenDSR was seen as analogous to other lifestyle changes such as switching to an electric vehicle, household retrofit or eating less meat, the shared goal being the minimisation of one's personal carbon footprint. Indeed, participants tended to share a strong sense of personal responsibility for climate change. For many, the hope was that action at the scale of the home might one day translate into changes at larger scales. Some, for example, emphasised that they wanted to use their own financial privileges to promote the development of smart energy technologies such that they might soon become accessible to a broader range of energy users. A number of participants appeared to approach their home as a laboratory, participating in OpenDSR alongside a range of other energy industry trials to help demonstrate the viability of low carbon technologies and lifestyles to others. In the words of environmental consultant John:

What do you do in terms of what can you, what can an individual do? There's a whole variety of complex things that need to be addressed through looking at things like the circular economy. But that's not something I can change personally… I mean, I'm in the fenlands of East Anglia and they’re talking about the generation of solar. Well, I've got no control over that… At least, you know, I've got control over and am attempting to kind of influence things that can happen in the home by using my own home as a, well as a case study or pilot to try things out in.

Here, John alludes to a sense of powerlessness he feels in relation to the complex multi-scalar socioecological processes unfolding around him. He reclaims a sense of agency by taking control of his home environment and using this to promote the kinds of low-carbon sociotechnical innovation he one day hopes to see adopted across wider scales. Jake, a project manager for a charity, expressed a similar sentiment:

I think for me, the biggest thing we could do to support society to make big changes like this [low-carbon transition] is to bin off capitalism and sadly, I don't see that happening any time in the immediate future… I feel almost completely powerless to make those sort of changes… So little things like this [participation in OpenDSR] help because it's a project that you can do to help try and improve the world – without rioting, as the French would have done no doubt by now! …There are things you can do, there are choices that we can make as a consumer to consume better. I hate the term consumer, don't know about you, but it feels so like powerless, you know?

Jake, as with many OpenDSR participants, was aware of the contradictions that plague the pursuit of the low-carbon home or lifestyle. While he remains committed to the ‘little things’ one can do ‘to help try and improve the world’, his comments as to the powerlessness of consumer citizenship and the desperate need for forms of political economic change that he currently sees as unachievable offer a somewhat ambivalent picture. This ambivalence was present across several of the interviews I conducted. Some participants felt guilty about particular aspects of their personal and professional lives, which implicated them in various forms of high-carbon consumption, ranging from frequent business air travel to the collection of classic cars. For these individuals, low-carbon smart experimentation within the home was approached as a form of carbon offsetting. Others shared concerns about the harmful socioecological processes through which the technologies they were deploying were produced, with the intensive forms of mining and extraction bound up with electric vehicles frequently referenced.

In sum, most participants had some awareness as to the complexities of the relationship between what we might think of as lifestyle environmentalism and systemic change. For Daggett, the central problem with the thermodynamic concept of energy is that this lens helps reproduce a violent productivist politics inescapably tied to the exploitation of both humans and nonhumans. The ambivalence felt by some OpenDSR participants raises the possibility that, along such lines, the smart grid might help reproduce business as usual. Angel (2022) argues that the smart grid's enrolment in capitalist social relations is itself no reason to assume that smart grids could not be deployed within more emancipatory socioecological projects. Indeed, the vision of the co-operative smart grid underpinning OpenDSR is in one sense an actually existing example of a smart grid project that aspires to do just this. That said, the extent to which many project participants deployed smart energy technologies to service and facilitate high-carbon and ecologically intensive consumer practices – and the lack of political agency participants seemed to feel in regards to the possibility of collective action and systemic change – is suggestive of the kind of critique found within Daggett's work.

Energetic hierarchy

This critique extends to the forms of hierarchy evident within the OpenDSR project. Thermodynamic energy, for Daggett, has been a conceptual tool deployed by the ruling class to divide and discipline, with energetic discourses of idleness and laziness deployed to degrade and dehumanise classed and racialised subjects. It is quite clear that Carbon Co-op's values are anathema to these relations of domination. Moreover, in no sense did my interviews with OpenDSR participants invoke these classed and racialised energetic tropes explicitly. That said, my sense is that other, more subtle, energetic hierarchies were identifiable within the ways some project participants saw themselves in relation to others.

Firstly, many participants drew a distinction between two groups of people: ‘early adopter’ enthusiasts of low-carbon technologies and lifestyles on the one hand, and ‘normal people’ on the other. Those who drew this kind of distinction and included themselves in the former category of early adopters often saw themselves as more educated and informed on environmental issues than ‘normal people’ and, further, as behaving in more ethical and environmentally conscious ways. George, a semi-retired entrepreneur, exemplified this perspective:

People aren't broadly, as a broad brush of citizens, as aware as they need to be for them to spontaneously do the right thing. So you know there's a knowledge gap, there's an empowerment gap, there's definitely a resource gap. So, you know, again, I've been lucky enough to be able to go out and buy lots of smart devices and make investments in energy that I know that many of my peers could not afford to do…We have the same issues with things like obesity, eating habits, exercise habits. It's really difficult to get individuals to take ownership of their own health and lifestyle choices. That's how I see it. I mean, I could go on, but I'll start to make myself unpopular. I have quite elitist views, which is embarrassing at times. I wish I didn't. But I know that, you know, there's a lot of people who are who are not socially aware or educated to make the right choices.

While most of the participants I met were not as explicit about their ‘elitist’ views as George, there was a sense amongst many that their level of literacy and enthusiasm around low-carbon technologies somehow separated them from others around them. While there was usually some degree of recognition amongst participants that one's capacity to access smart energy technologies was shaped by financial means, most retained some sense of themselves as performing what Bulkeley et al. (2016b) term ‘good energy conduct’ in a way that others did not. Those participants who thought of themselves in this way inscribed a subtle moral hierarchy that associates virtuous domestic practice with the kinds of environmental optimisation discussed above. On this ethical framework, one's capacity to use technology to avoid unnecessary energy consumption and emissions is venerated. Waste and efficiency, then, emerge as central to the production of moral hierarchy within smart energopower.

The hierarchy in question, what's more, had a clear gendered dimension within OpenDSR. Of the 42 participants recruited to the trial, only two were women. The majority of the male participants I spoke with were middle-aged men, living with female partners. When asked about their partner's participation in OpenDSR, these men often told me that their partner had little to no interest in the project or in the various other smart technologies deployed in their household. The typical response here was a self-deprecating and humorous depiction of themselves as ‘geeky’ or ‘boring’ in a way that their partner was not, with analogies drawn between a passion for low-carbon technology and typically ‘masculine’ interests such as DIY, cars and computer games. The participant base of OpenDSR, then, was very clearly aligned with ‘Resource Man’, the typical smart energy subject described by Strengers (2013), raising difficult questions about the potential of the project to live up to its egalitarian values.

Varieties of work and waste

To summarise the argument thus far, my contention has been that the smart energy system developed within OpenDSR appears to reproduce the governmental logic of energopower that Daggett seeks to challenge. On the basis of my experiences with OpenDSR, the smart grid emerges as a sociotechnical device geared towards the maximisation of efficiency, in terms of the minimisation of wasted money, energy and carbon – thus emerges smart energopower. In doing so, my suggestion has been that the smart grid might be implicated within the reproduction of dominant socio-ecological relations, as well as the formation of new energetic hierarchies. However, my sense is that the reproduction of energopower within the smart grid is not in itself sufficient grounds for writing off the smart grid's place within an emancipatory environmental politics. Indeed, I want to suggest that there are ways in which the forms of efficiency pursued by OpenDSR might not be as objectionable as Daggett's account implies.

One of the core arguments within The Birth of Energy is that an environmental politics that remains tied to the thermodynamic concept of energy will end up reproducing dominant ideas of work and waste. Environmentalists, Daggett points out, often take an uncritical stance towards waged labour with, for example, Keynesian calls for a Green New Deal premised upon the promotion of new forms of alienated work within low-carbon industries. What's more, in making the case for more simple, ascetic and thrifty lifestyles, Daggett's view is that environmentalists have inherited capitalists’ fear of entropic decline. The result, Daggett argues, is an environmentalism that holds little liberatory potential. An environmentalism that leaves thermodynamic energy behind and rebuilds on the basis of an anti-work agenda, in contrast, holds the promise of more pleasurable and creative ways of living – an altogether more attractive platform for progressive politics, in Daggett's view. It is on this basis that the imaginary of energy freedom is proposed.

I wholeheartedly agree with Daggett's take on the potential of an environmentalism and energy politics that seeks to push against productivism and waged labour. However, I wonder whether, at times, Daggett's account collapses different forms of work and waste together and in doing so offers a political outlook that is not as nuanced as it could be. Daggett, recall, argues that the concept of energy efficiency reinforces the connections between energy and the work ethic and, as such, posits the concept of energy freedom in its place. To my mind, this argument seems a little too quick – discourses and practices of energy efficiency are more complex in their political potential than Daggett acknowledges. Put briefly, minimising energy wastage in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions seems to me quite different to minimising wastage in broader process of economic production by castigating and disciplining ‘idle’ human labour in pursuit of profit. Perhaps, in other words, attempts to minimise waste might have different political stakes, depending upon what, precisely, is being wasted.

 Indeed, the experiences of OpenDSR participants suggest that the kinds of efficiencies they pursued within their household energy consumption might serve to enhance human comfort and pleasure in the ways that Daggett suggests environmentalists should champion. Some participants spoke of the ways in which their everyday lives had been made easier by smart plugs and smart lights that actually reduced the need for human labour within the reproduction of domestic life. Retired taxi driver Graham, for example, said:

We can control individual rooms by voice. Just, it's easier. Really, we can open our back gates and open the door, open the garage doors and close the garage doors. It's just crazy stuff. Like it's so easy and convenient day to day. You can't fault it… It's the convenience. Yeah… See, it's bedtime and the kitchen light, the hall light, the bedside table – I’ll say good night and it will kill all the lights and it is just absolute genius.

Many had undertaken extensive retrofits of their homes and in turn enjoyed lower energy bills, warmer room temperatures and healthier indoor environments free from damp and mould. These kind of efficiencies seem to be more aligned with an environmentalism premised upon desire and abundance, than austerity and scarcity. In addition, there seems to be an intuitive ecological benefit to reducing energy demand in this way. It should be noted that this point is often contested with reference to the so-called ‘Jevons paradox’, first identified by 19th century economist William Stanley Jevons around the time of the Industrial Revolution. Jevons’ critique of energy efficiency was that the consequence of efficiency is cheaper energy, which subsequently affords energy users with more disposable income and, in turn, leads to increased consumption. The pertinence of this critique with regards to energy efficiency is, however, still debated. I am inclined to agree with Sarah Knuth (2019), who cautions against accepting this critique at face value with regards to the energy sector. In Knuth's words: ‘It is by no means obvious that recipients will pour energy cost savings from repair projects back into intensified energy usage – or even into broader consumer spending’ (p. 492).

Knuth, in her discussion of household retrofits, does an admirable job of conveying the political complexities of energy efficiency, highlighting the multiple important socio-ecological purposes that energy efficiency can help achieve while at the same time acknowledging the ways in which energy efficiency measures such as retrofit can be enrolled within processes of urban accumulation and green gentrification. Autumn Thoyre's (2021) account of the making of energy efficiency as a resource reaches a similarly balanced conclusion. While Thoyre argues that saved energy is increasingly being produced as a new source of capital accumulation, her provocation is that if energy efficiency is a resource, then struggles towards the democratisation of its extraction and production might prove productive. Knuth and Thoyre seem to offer a more generative take than the blanket opposition to energy efficiency that Daggett seems to offer. Daggett highlights that the political rationality underpinning the pursuit of energy efficiency bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the political rationality underpinning the exploitative pursuit of efficiency within the labour process – a comparison very much worth reflecting upon. My sense, however, is that these forms of efficiency are qualitatively different and need to be treated as such.

Conclusion

I want to close the paper by drawing out two conclusions from the preceding discussion. Firstly, I hope that the argument I have made has opened the door for further conversations within political ecology pertaining to Daggett's critique of thermodynamic energy. Within my own discipline of geography, Daggett's important argument has so far not made its way into energy debates. In analysing the smart grid through the lens of Daggett's critique, I hope to have made clear that this approach has much to offer on both a conceptual and empirical level. Yet I also hope that my argument – particularly in the latter stage of the paper – has served to raise questions of Daggett's position. Put briefly, my sense is that future engagements with Daggett's argument in The Birth of Energy need to be careful to distinguish between variegated forms of work and waste in ways that Daggett herself seems to gloss over.

Second, the paper has attempted to push forward conceptual and political debates around the smart grid. I have shown that the smart grid can be read as an embodiment of the governmental logic of energopower: smart energopower implicates smart energy technologies within reproducing the relationships between energy and the careful monitoring, quantification and minimisation of waste. However, while this would seem to qualify as a critique of the smart grid in the terms set out by Daggett, in teasing apart analyses of waged labour and energy efficiency, I hope to have made clear that matters are somewhat more complicated. My analysis of OpenDSR did raise questions around the politics of the smart grid, raising the worry that smart grids can easily be accommodated into dominant capitalist arrangements and, moreover, identifying forms of hierarchy that can emerge through smart grid ‘conduct’. However, as the OpenDSR project illustrates via its unique co-operative ethos, the ‘smart grid’ concept is highly malleable and prone to be deployed through a variety of potentially conflicting sociotechnical trajectories.

In leaving the political stakes of the smart grid fairly open-ended, my analysis departs from the view that the smart grid is inescapably bound up with the reproduction of neoliberal capitalism (Levenda et al., 2015; Sadowski and Levenda, 2020). While there are doubtless good reasons to be concerned about the rise of the smart grid – from the extension of the power of large technology firms through to the consolidation of market logics within the home – I am inclined to agree with Carbon Co-op energy practitioners, who advocate for progressive interventions within the smart grid sector in order to help mitigate these concerns and to democratise this emerging technology. The ambiguous implications of OpenDSR and the imaginaries of energy, work and waste this promotes illustrate the complexity of enacting this kind of intervention. My hope is that this paper persuades scholars and activists working on energy justice, energy democracy and, following Daggett, energy freedom, that engaging with this complexity is a necessary and generative task.