A relational approach to understanding inhabitants’ engagement with Photovoltaic (PV) technology in homes

Abstract

Photovoltaic (PV) systems have been promoted in the UK housing sector as a key strategy for meeting carbon reduction commitments by offsetting the use of the non-renewable grid energy with renewable energy. However, inhabitants are not changing their routine energy consumption practices to take advantage of off-grid day time solar energy and, in some cases, even shifting practices away from the initial intentions underlying the technology. This means that the necessary energy savings from new housing are not being achieved. In this paper, this is attributed to the variation in the provisioning of PV technology in new homes, as well as inhabitants’ engagement with and know-how of PV technologies, subject to explicit rules and policies. The key contribution of this paper is to reveal how PV technologies and inhabitants interact within different socio-technological home contexts drawing on Practice theory and ethnographic methods applied to four housing developments in England.

KEYWORDS:

• Community housing
• Photovoltaic (PV)
• practice
• inhabitants
• socio-technological
• energy performance gap

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 CSH Code levels 3 and 4 required the equivalent of a 25% and 44% CO₂ emissions reduction respectively in relation to the Dwelling Emission Rate (DER), leading to the ‘zero-carbon’ standards (code levels 5 and 6).

2 The UK’s FIT consists of two payments made by the energy supplier to the registered PV installations during the eligibility period of 20–25 years: generation and export tariffs. See (Energy Saving Trust 2014) for more details.

3 An abductive analysis is an iterative dialogue between the empirical data and existing theories in order to provide a more comprehensive understanding of a phenomenon, and to advance an existing theory based on empirical setting (Dubios and Gadde 2002).

4 The inhabitants who have participated in the provisioning process of their homes with the other professionals.