The role of gender, age, and income in demand side management acceptance: a literature review
Paper i proceeding, 2023

Demand-side management (DSM) programs aiming to both reduce and render household consumption more flexible, are becoming increasingly essential due to energy crises and the growing integration of renewable energy into energy production. The involvement of households and energy users is crucial to fully unlock the potential of DSM programs. As this paper demonstrates, despite more than thirty years of feminist scholarly work focusing on the home as an important site of the production of gender inequality, few of these insights have been taken into account by DSM-designers. Additionally, we note a broader pattern concerning gaps in knowledge regarding the diverse perspectives of energy users and their domestic contexts, all of which create obstacles to successful rollout and scalability. This paper uses the concept of the social license to automate and insight from feminist research to analyse the literature on DSM programs. We find three primary barriers in household DSM programs: 1) there is an unresolved tension between DSM technology being perceived as a masculine domain and the home as a feminine domain, 2) low-income households face challenges in accessing the technology needed to enable both flexibility and savings, and 3) disparities in opportunities for participation among elderly and young individuals in DSM programs and their complex reasons are insufficiently considered. Based on these findings we argue that user diversity needs to form a starting point in DSM program design for fair and scalable solutions.

Social license to automate 2.0

Demand-side management (DSM)

Diversity

Gender

Energy demand

Social license to automate (SLA)

Författare

Ida Marie Henriksen

Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet

Helena Strömberg

Chalmers, Industri- och materialvetenskap, Design & Human Factors

Lisa Diamond

AIT Austrian Institute of Technology

Jennifer Branlat

Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet

Lenart Motnikar

AIT Austrian Institute of Technology

Giulia Garzon

Energieinstitut Johannes Kepler University Linz

Declan Kuch

Western Sydney University

Selin Yilmaz

Université de Genève

Tomas Moe Skjølsvold

Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet

Proceedings of the 2023 BEHAVE Conference

0000-0000 (ISSN) 0000-0000 (eISSN)

444-455

BEHAVE 2023, the 7th European Conference on Behaviour Change for Energy Efficiency
Maastricht, Netherlands,

IEA UsersTCP SLA 2.0: Inclusive and Community-Oriented Approaches to a Social License to Automate

Energimyndigheten, 2022-11-01 -- 2024-10-31.

Ämneskategorier

Genusstudier

Energisystem

Drivkrafter

Hållbar utveckling

Styrkeområden

Energi

Mer information

Senast uppdaterat

2023-12-13