Smart Energy Technologies in Everyday Life: Smart Utopia? [Hardcover]

This book interrogates the global utopian vision for smart energy technologies and the new energy consumer intended to realise it. It enriches and extends the possibilities of four residential smart strategies: energy feedback, dynamic pricing, home automation and micro-generation, focusing on how they are being integrated into everyday practice.1. Introducing the Smart Utopia 2. Imagining the Smart Utopia 3. Resource Man 4. Energy in everyday practice 5. Energy feedback 6. Dynamic pricing 7. Home automation 8. Micro-generation 9. Reimagining the Smart Utopia: a conclusion

With considerable theoretical sophistication, Yolande Strengers incisively interrogates the promises attached to the Smart Utopian vision of a world in which our energy problems will be solved by smart technologies and the smart use of data. Drawing on a wealth of empirical examples, Strengers critically traces how Smart Utopia, grounded as it is in the idealized figure of Resource Man, articulates with the complex and contingent practices that make up everyday life. For anyone interested in the unfolding future of energy use Smart Energy Technologies in Everyday Life is essential reading. - Mike Michael, Professor of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Sydney, Australia

This intriguing and critical book shows how contrasting paradigms and discourses of domestic energy use are performed and reproduced through interventions like those of smart metering, peak pricing and localised generation. In this important work, Strengers calls for a searching re-imagination of energy systems and the ways of life they sustain. - Elizabeth Shove, Professor of Sociology, Lancaster University, UK

Smart Energy Technologies in Everyday Life is a wonderfully eloquent and incisive investigation of the rise of smart devices and rhetoric. Far from being instruments of transformative social change Strengers shows how 'smart' stuff interacts with consumers; how, when l³Q