Ambivalent Technopolitics: Engaging with Alternative Energy Technologies at Home

• In Event: Domestic Technologies: Place, Person, Process – II

Abstract

As part of low-carbon energy transitions solar micro-generation of electricity is currently booming in the Czech Republic. In affluent households with photovoltaic installations, automated electricity meters, batteries and their digital interfaces have become new domestic technologies that confound the boundaries between home and environment, the political and the domestic. The concept ‘material participation’ (Marres) highlights the ways in which engagements with domestic energy devices act upon the environment, potentially generating environmental and energy-literacy (Ryhaug et al.). This paper contributes to regenerating critical technopolitical practices by exploring frictions, uncertainties and ambivalences in practical engagements with energy technologies at home. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews and photography undertaken in households with solar microgeneration and at trade fairs, I examine the incentives, imaginaries, and affective and sensory involvements with material and digital technologies. While the promise of solar micro-generation lies in the digital interconnectivity of energy garnering and consuming devices to enable a ‘global energy commons’, I explore the reluctance, even anxiety, of householders to share or sell home-produced electricity, and persistent attachments to self-sufficiency and energy independence in the post-socialist context. And yet, there are unexpected openings: Attempts to manage and control electricity consumption by synchronising everyday activities with the availability of the sun also attunes householders to the unpredictability of changing weather; questions arise where their domestic technologies have been produced and might be discarded in the global South. Amplifying these relationalities and marginalised concerns the paper contributes to fostering more capacious practices and imaginaries of shared energy futures.

Author

• Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer, Charles University In Prague