Online reading room explores temporal aspects of energy demand

08 September, 2020

Reading time: 2 minutes

The Flexibility team were joined in an online reading room by a panel of international guests to discuss a new article, Conceptualising flexibility.

On 28 July 2020, the CREDS flexibility team organised an online ‘reading room’ in which we were joined by a panel of international guests to discuss our article Conceptualising flexibility, published in May 2020 in Time and Society.

The reading room, hosted by Elizabeth Shove and produced by Stan Blue provided a rare opportunity for energy modellers and social scientists to get together to consider different ways of thinking about and measuring the temporal aspects of energy demand. Each of the 15 contributors explained how the strategies and ideas outlined in the article related to their own work (or not). These opening remarks set the scene for what then became a more detailed discussion about how temporal relations between practices change; about whether this constitutes flexibility and if so, for whom? and more broadly about the scope for feeding more theoretical concepts of time into the practicalities of modelling the extent, the location and the timing of energy demand in different societies and contexts.

Transcript: Conceptualising flexibility: Challenging representations of time and society in the energy sector

Participants are from different disciplines and countries, including Japan, Switzerland, Italy, Germany and the UK, and include Michelle Bastian, the editor of Time and Society.

Further reading rooms

Participants:

  • Jacopo Torritti
  • Elizabeth Shove
  • Stan Blue
  • Stefan Smith
  • Nicola Labanca
  • Antti Silvast
  • Michael Greenhough
  • Max Kleinebrahm
  • Selin Yilmaz
  • ​Debbie Hopkins
  • Dale Southerton
  • Yohei Yamaguchi
  • Michelle Bastian
  • Samuele Lo Piano
  • Jose Luis Ramirez-Mendiola

Banner photo credit: Chris Montgomery on Unsplash