Historicising Flexibility

Articles

Creating supply, creating demand: Gas and electricity in Montréal from the First World War to the Great Depression

PhD candidate, Institut national de la recherche scientifique, Centre Urbanisation Culture Société (Québec) & Sorbonne Université, UMR Sirice (Paris)
clarencehatton[at]gmail.com
Twitter : @clarence_hp


Reducing energy use is a key imperative for Western societies. However, it is hard to envision how this might come about and what changes are entailed. This article proposes that studying energy history helps understand flexibility in energy systems. It uses the case of…

Demanding demand: Political configurations of energy flexibility in Berlin, 1920-2020

Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems (IRI THESys), Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany.
mosstimo@hu-berlin.de

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Department of Geography, Centre for Climate and Energy Transformation (CET), University of Bergen, Norway / Department of Media and Social Sciences, University of Stavanger, Norway.
Siddharth.Sareen@uis.no
Twitter: @sidsareen


Berlin’s modern history provides an instructive window on the evolution of energy flexibility in an urban context. Since being enlarged to its current territory in 1920, it has encountered a huge variety of political regimes and disruptive socio-economic events that have substantially impacted…

Histories of balancing demand and supply in the UK’s gas networks, 1795 – present

University of Northumbria (UK)
peter.forman[at]northumbria.ac.uk


This paper provides an account of how past changes in energy demand have affected the balancing of the UK’s gas systems between the introduction of gaslight in 1795 and the present day. Four periods are examined in which the principal uses of gas have broadly differed: periods in which the…

Polyflexibility in public lighting

Newcastle University
robert.shaw2[at]ncl.ac.uk
Twitter: @WhatIsRobShaw


This article introduces the concept of ‘Polyflexibility’ as a way of expressing the complexity of interacting forms of flexibility. The term, deriving from Henri Lefebvre’s concept of polyrhythmia, is used in contrast to conceptualizations of flexibility in energy studies which rest primarily on…

The history of heat-as-a-service for promoting domestic demand-side flexibility: Lessons from the case of Budget Warmth

UCL Energy Institute
michael.fell[at]ucl.ac.uk
Twitter: @mikefsway


Heat-as-a-Service (HaaS) involves the provision of agreed room temperatures at certain times for a fixed fee, instead of charging for energy use on a per-unit basis. This arrangement enables the operator to remotely manage the heating system to use electricity when it is cheaper, thereby…

Flexibilities in energy supply and demand: Legacies and lessons from the past

Sociology, Lancaster University
@stanleybluephd

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Geography and Environmental Science, Northumbria University
@PeterJForman1

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Sociology, Lancaster University
@ElizabethShove


The goal of maintaining current levels of energy supply and demand whilst reducing their carbon intensity will require greater use of renewables. As a result, new forms of flexibility will be needed. While the emerging “flexibility industry” promises solutions based on current configurations,…

Flexibility of real-time energy distribution: the changing practices of energy control rooms

Department of Anthropology, Durham University.
simone.abram[at]durham.ac.uk

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Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture, Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
antti.silvast[at]ntnu.no


This paper examines the linked concepts of flexibility and control, focusing on how these are enacted in the operation of control rooms in Distribution Network Organisations. We discuss the limits to flexibility, and the kinds of flexibility that are at stake in distribution network control of…