Devising the consumer of the competitive electricity market: the mundane meter, the unbundling doctrine, and the re-bundling of choice

ABSTRACT

This paper follows the sinuous trajectory of the joint design of an electricity meter and the technical architecture of the smart home in France. The analysis points to the articulation between the mundane work of material and market design and the profound, pervasive, and political issue of ‘agencing’ consumption. Three figures of the consumer appeared along with the evolving design of the smart home and meter: a behavioural energy saver; a market offer chooser, and an attached consumer. The ‘unbundling’ doctrine, which states that competition must be sorted out from monopoly in order for the electricity market to function, was often invoked to justify changes in the smart meter and smart home designs. The role of the doctrine was, however, ambiguous. As a rather abstract perspective on the working of markets, unbundling seems to be exceeded by concrete and mundane marketing attempts at re-bundling choice. And yet consumer figures doctrinally compatible with classical/neoliberal economics, which considers the consumer to be an autonomous self, leave open the ground for an attached consumer to emerge, suggesting that the consumer is in fact always ‘attached’ rather than detached.

KEYWORDS:

• Electricity
• meter
• market
• unbundling
• consumers

Acknowledgements

We gratefully thank Stefan Schwarzkopf and Tomas Ariztia and two anonymous reviewers for invaluable feedback on previous versions of this paper when it was presented at the EGOS conference in 2015 and at the NUMIES seminar in 2016 and first submitted to this journal. We warmly extend our thanks to Dan Neyland, Vera Ehrenstein, and Sveta Milyaeva for their support and feedback in the process of finalizing this article. All errors remain, of course, ours.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Catherine Grandclément is a researcher at EDF R&D. Her research combines elements of science and technology studies and economic sociology to examine the constitution of people as consumers in the energy sector.

Alain Nadaï is senior interdisciplinary social scientist at CIRED-CNRS, the International Research Centre on Environment and Development, a part of French CNRS. His research work focuses on the processes of energy transition, looking at the socio-technical construction of actors, spaces and entities in these processes.

ORCID

Catherine Grandclément http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0287-4425

Alain Nadaï http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0383-2729

Notes

1. The national regulatory authorities coordinate at the EU level through the Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators (ACER). The Third Package actually advocates ‘ownership unbundling’, splitting the ownership of production and retail of electricity from that of its transmission infrastructure. Ownership unbundling is supposed to grant free competition in an open marketplace by avoiding vertical integration, a situation in which the supply chain of a company is owned by that company. German and French member states however have exhibited a strong reluctance toward ownership unbundling (Jabko 2006). In France, EDF, the state company that previous to 1996 was in a monopoly position, went through an ‘accounting unbundling’ of its different parts (production, grid, provision) but remains integrated as to its ownership (about 80% by the French state).

2. We conducted a total of eight interviews in May 2014 and March 2016 at the following institutions: the grid operator, the energy regulator, the Ministry of Energy, the energy and environment Agency, the R&D of the national electricity company and the energy ombudsman.

3. This is a requirement of the European directive, which gives an objective of equipping with smart meters a minimum of 80% of consumers across all member states by 2020, provided that the cost–benefit analysis is positive. See Directive 2009/72/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 July 2009 concerning common rules for the internal market in electricity.

4. order of 4 January 2012 pursuant to Article 4 of Decree No. 2010-1022 of 31 August 2010 on metering devices on public electricity networks.

5. See Directive 2012/27/EU on Energy Efficiency – Article 18.

Additional information

Funding

This work was carried out with the financial support of the French National Research Agency (ANR, Programme sociétés innovantes, convention 2011- SOIN-003-01, projet COLLENER). The content of this paper does not reflect the official opinion of the ANR, the CNRS, the CIRED, EDF or any of the organisations and institutions cited in the paper. Responsibility for the information and views expressed in the article lies entirely with the authors.