Area (2007) 39.

4, 458–469

Carbon reduction, ‘the public’ and renewable

Blackwell Publishing Ltd

energy: engaging with socio-technical

configurations
Gordon Walker and Noel Cass
Department of Geography, Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YQ
Email: g.p.walker@lancaster.ac.uk

Revised manuscript received 6 July 2007

In the context of challenging targets for renewable energy generation, this paper draws
out social implications of moves towards low carbon energy systems. As renewable
energy develops as a heterogeneous category, many potential forms of social relation
between ‘publics’ and technologies are emerging. Utilising perspectives from science
and technology studies, we outline five modes in which renewable energy has been
implemented in the UK and how these involve different configurations of technology and
social organisation. We argue that a multiplicity of roles for ‘the public’ are implicated
across this increasingly complex landscape, cutting across established categories and
raising questions of meaning, differentiation, interrelation and access. Policy assumptions
and conceptions are questioned, highlighting that dominant characterisations of public
roles have been part of a concentration on particular socio-technical pathways to the
exclusion of others.

Key words: renewable energy, public, socio-technical configurations, UK

energy utilisation that need to be examined,

Introduction
It has become increasingly clear that to make the
major carbon reductions being called for to mitigate
future climate change there will need to be moves
towards energy systems that incorporate a far greater
use of renewable energy technologies (Stern 2007;
European Union Council 2007). Such emerging
energy systems will, at least in the medium term,
take a hybrid form, with large-scale coal, gas and
nuclear generation operated alongside more distributed
and multi-scaled configurations of renewable energy
technologies. What this might imply for technical
engineering, regulation and market performance is
being increasingly discussed in the academic and
policy literatures (e.g. Pehnt et al. 2006; Sauter and
Watson 2007; Willis 2006). However, there are also
profound social and geographical implications
embedded within emerging patterns of renewable
understood and assessed in relation to current and
future renewable energies policy. Our particular
concern here is with the relations between renewable
energy technologies and ‘the public’ – cast in various
guises and groups (Walker 1999) – and the multiple
roles and forms of engagement that are being
produced as the social organisation of renewable
energy technologies evolves and differentiates.
In this paper we draw on perspectives developed
in science and technology studies to consider how
changes in the deployment of renewable energy in
the UK require a far more embedded and multidi-
mensional conceptualisation of the roles, engagements
and potentiality of ‘the public’ within the energy
system. We show how as renewable energy develops
as a heterogeneous category of multiple sites, scales
and forms, and as more distributed systems of
provision and co-provision emerge (Van Vliet et al.

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 Carbon reduction, ‘the public’ and renewable energy 459
2005), various forms of geography are being con-
structed and many potential forms of social relation
and engagement between ‘publics’ and technologies
are being brought forward.
We begin with a discussion of key literature and
concepts before outlining a framework for charac-
terising different configurations of renewable energy
technologies and the elements of social organisation
involved in their deployment. We then analyse how
different socio-technical configurations encompass
various roles for ‘the public’ and the consequences
for policy and research which this implies.
Socio-technical systems and infrastructures
In order to develop our analysis of the changing
patterns of renewable energy implementation in
the UK, we draw from literature in science and
technology studies which conceives technologies
not simply as designed and engineered material
objects, but as embedded components of socio-
technical systems – in which producers, infrastructures,
users, consumers, regulators and other intermediaries
are all embroiled (Bijker et al. 1987; Coutard 1999;
Elzen et al. 2004). Under such a conceptualisation
the technical and the social are co-constitutive,
continually interacting and shaping each other with
exchanges in both directions (Bijker and Law 1992).
Accordingly, we can conceive renewable energy
technologies not simply as a series of engineered
artefacts performing energy conversions, but as
configurations of the social and technical which
have emerged contingently in particular contexts and
which mirror wider social, economic and technical
relations and processes.
A key part of understanding the dynamics of the
socio-technical is to focus on the relationships
between an object and surrounding actors, including,
importantly for our analysis, ‘the public’ as users,
consumers, customers etc. (Akrich 1992). Technology
and system developers ascribe imagined roles for
actors which they may or may not take up and
spaces in which they may or may not operate
(Bijker 1995). These actors in turn can devise their
own roles and alternative meanings for objects
that have interpretive flexibility in how they are
understood and represented (Law and Callon 1987).
Understanding how changes in socio-technical
systems take place therefore requires an analysis that
recognises the interactive roles of multiple actors
at different scales of activity (Elzen and Wieczorek
2005), the structural factors and distributions of
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power and agency that promote and constrain
potential trajectories (Klein and Kleinmann 2002),
and the politics of everyday practice (Shove 2003)
in which technologies are implicated. In each of
these respects ‘the public’ as actors in different
groups, guises and roles can be embroiled.
For infrastructural technologies (water, energy,
transport etc.) such conceptualisations have informed
analysis of the ways in which the often hidden and
mundane services of everyday life are provided and
how systems of provision have evolved over time
(Hughes 1983; Schwartz Cowan 1987; Southerton
et al. 2004; Shove 2003). Recent trends, it has been
argued, have the potential for radical transformation
of established infrastructural ideals as urban spaces
and related socio-technical infrastructures fracture and
reform (Graham and Marvin 2001; Coutard 2005).
This opens up possibilities for the development of
greener modes and systems of provision in which
new forms of interaction between utilities and con-
sumers are developed, new intermediaries become
involved and new patterns of differentiation and
co-provisioning can emerge (Van Vliet 2002; Van
Vliet et al. 2005). The specific possibilities presented
by distributed renewable energy generation have
been part of the tracing of innovative sustainable
socio-technical configurations in this literature (Van
Vliet 2002; Chappells 2003), including analysis of
how radically new consumer–producer relations and
interactions may emerge. Our objective in this paper
is to apply elements of this analysis more systematically
to the evolving UK context so as to provide a more
differentiated view of the roles for ‘publics’ that
are being produced and an initial exploration of the
policy implications arising from these understandings.
Configuring hardwares and softwares
To help in characterising the meshing of the
technological and the social within evolving
infrastructures of renewable energy provision, we
adopt in this section a shorthand that distinguishes
between the ‘hardware’ and ‘software’ of socio-
technical systems. Using this we can conceive the
‘hardware’ of engineered artefacts as being utilised
within and through the co-dependent and co-evolving
‘software’ of its social organisation. Each of these
elements is considered in turn.
Differentiated hardwares
Renewable energy is a socially constructed category,
covering a diverse and still evolving set of multiple
460 Walker and Cass

hardwares that are defined as renewable by sharing Differentiated softwares

one key characteristic – that through generating
useable energy in the form of electricity or heat,
the resource base is not depleted or significantly
diminished. This is a quality not of the hardware
itself, but of the energy conversion that is being
performed and, in some instances, the way that
this conversion through technology is organised.
For biomass burning, renewal of the resource is
dependent on the replenishment of the stock of
wood, energy crops or wastes – a question of
organisation and practice rather than of technology.
Renewable energy generation hardwares also involve
low levels of pollution, including carbon dioxide,
but not exclusively so.
Not only are the forms of hardware within the
renewable energy category diverse and heteroge-
neous, but they can be implemented at markedly
different material sizes1 – in terms of both physical
form and energy generating capacity. This is illustrated
in Table 1, which, for five forms of renewable
energy, distinguishes between macro, meso, micro
and pico sizes of implementation. This ‘hyper-
sizeability’ is a distinctive characteristic of renewable
energy hardwares not as readily realised by other
energy technologies; commonplace nuclear reactors
remain a fantasy of the 1950s. Each of these hard-
wares, when implemented at different sizes, has
different relational qualities of physical presence,
connection to other physical infrastructure (buildings
in particular), degrees of mobility and potential
for environmental impact and disturbance. These
qualities, as we shall discuss later, are also implicated
in various ways in the forms of social relation
between technology and publics.
The ‘software’ of social and infrastructural organisa-
tion through which alternative renewable energy
hardwares are utilised and given purpose and
meaning is similarly heterogeneous and evolving.
What makes up the software of social organisation
is a combination of different interacting arrangements
and relations between actors and institutions that
can be extrapolated from four sets of questions:
• Function and service: what is the generated energy
being used for in terms of the services (comfort,
warmth, visibility, mobility etc.) that it is providing?
Who utilises these potential services and what
physical and institutional distance is there between
the point of energy production and the point of
service ‘consumption’?
• Ownership and return: who owns the technology
and how is this ownership organised – privately,
publicly, collectively – and at what scale – locally,
nationally, internationally? What benefits, monetary
or otherwise, are returned as a consequence of
ownership?
• Management and operation : who manages,
controls and maintains the hardware and how
is this organised – privately, publicly, collectively;
locally, remotely? To what extent is management
regulated and through what principles and
mechanisms?
• Infrastructure and networking: is the energy that is
generated fed into an electricity or heat network
(is it on or off grid?) and if so, what scale of network
– local, regional or national? What/who does this
network supply and how is it managed (locally,
distantly; publicly or by regulated market?)

Table 1 Examples of renewable energy technology hardware at different sizes

Type Macro Meso Micro Pico Energy form

Wind Wind farm Stand alone wind Roof-mounted Canal barge, Electricity
turbine(s) turbine mounted turbine
Biomass Biomass-fuelled Biomass-fuelled Wood-fuelled Wood burners Heat and/or
turbine district heating system boiler and stoves electricity
Solar PV Solar power station PV building cladding Roof PV panels Calculator, Electricity
garden lights
Solar heat Solar furnace Passive solar building Roof panels or Solar ovens Heat
design swimming pool
Hydro-electric Reservoir based Small hydro Micro hydro Hydro in Electricity
power streams
Ground source – Office block or Household – Heat
heat pump industrial unit heating heating system

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 Carbon reduction, ‘the public’ and renewable energy 461
There are a large number of permutations to how these
four sets of questions can be answered individually
and in combination – as crucially any one combina-
tion of hardware form and size does not necessarily
imply any one particular configuration of social
organisation; alternatives are always theoretically
available. It is then a question of which hardware
and software combinations become configurations
that ‘work’ at a particular place and time and which
remain unrealised or marginalised.
Five modes of implementation
To illustrate the use of this framework, Table 2
characterises five commonly understood ‘modes’ of
renewable energy implementation that have emerged
in the UK and the broad configurations of ‘hardware’
and ‘software’ associated with each mode. We
specifically use ‘mode’ here in preference to the
terms ‘regime’ and ‘niche’ that are commonly used
in the literature on socio-technical systems (Rip
and Kemp 1998; Geels and Schot 2007). As a looser
term ‘mode’ allows for greater simultaneous heter-
ogeneity and avoids some of the problematic
assumptions of the deliberate nested hierarchical
transition management framework (for a more detailed
discussion, see Shove and Walker 2007). The label
given to each mode, and the key distinguishing
factor that we thereby highlight, identifies the locus
of agency to implement energy generation. Table 2
also indicates the political discourses associated
with each mode, highlighting how their emergence
has been bound up and legitimised by wider
ideological currents (Bijker et al. 1987).
The first of the five modes, ‘public utility’,
homogenised renewable energy production through
much of the twentieth century. Technology hardware
consisted only of large-scale hydroelectric power
(HEP). No other types or sizes of renewable energy
hardware were deployed, excepting a few state-funded
demonstration projects. The HEP installations were
operated and managed by public sector institutions
under a ‘universal provision’ ideology (Van Vliet
et al. 2005) and supplied electricity into the national
grid, without this being distinguished as ‘green’
electricity or isolatable from that produced by other
forms of power generation.
The second mode, ‘private supplier’, emerged after
privatisation of the energy utilities and infrastruc-
tures in 1989. Reflecting wider neo-liberal ideology,
consumer choice and market logics (Toke and Lauber
2007), liberalisation opened up opportunities for
new entrants into energy production with diversifica-
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tion of renewable energy hardware supported by
subsidies and protected market share for specified
forms and sizes of ‘near market’ technologies (Mitchell
et al. 2006). A stream of spatially dispersed private
sector projects, primarily on-shore wind farms and
energy from waste installations, extended the type
and size of hardware beyond large-scale HEP
(Walker 1997). The range of organisations, partners
and intermediaries involved also diversified, with
functional distinctions appearing between generation
and supply and between those developing, owning
and managing particular facilities. However, the
social organisation has been largely standardised on
a model of private capital funding with returns to
shareholders, feeding electricity into the grid and
working through a liberalised but regulated energy
market. Under this mode ‘green’ electricity becomes
a distinct commodity, with tariffs available for
customers to purchase a proportion or all of their
electricity from renewable sources (Hartmann and
Ibanez 2007).
The third mode, ‘community’, has its roots in
normative activist discourses of the 1960s and 1970s
(Dunn 1978; Lovins 1977). Through a community
approach, it was argued, energy hardware and
software configurations could be radically different
– smaller-scale, locally appropriate, environmentally
and socially benign. Such perspectives were brought
into the mainstream of energy policy in the early
2000s, largely for instrumental rather than norma-
tive reasons, but drawing on a neo-communitarian
discourse of local participation and empowerment
(Walker et al. 2007a). A series of funding and
support programmes were set up and by late 2004
an estimated 500 projects, predominantly in rural
areas, were under development (Walker et al. 2007a).
These have implemented technologies at meso and
micro sizes, and utilised a multiplicity of configura-
tions of the different elements of social organisation.
Some are entirely off-grid, supplying heat or elec-
tricity to single buildings, or to groups of buildings
through a local network. Others both supply locally
and distribute excess electricity to the national grid
or are only grid connected. Some are collectively
owned through cooperative-based share ownership,
some are set up and operated by existing local
authority and/or community institutions in partner-
ship arrangements (Owen 2004). What makes these
projects distinctively ‘community’ is imprecisely
defined and contested. In practice, however, they
have involved processes of project development
that are to some degree local and collective in
 462 Walker and Cass
Table 2 Five modes of implementation of renewable energy in the UK
Journal compilation © Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2007

Underlying Function and Management and Infrastructure and

Modes discourses Technologies Size service Ownership and return operation networking

Public Universal provision Hydroelectric Macro Electricity for grid Public, return to state Publicly owned National
utility and distanced utility electricity grid
consumption
Private Neoliberal market Wind, waste to Macro Electricity for grid Private, differentiated, Privately owned National
supplier logic, consumer energy, hydro and and distanced return to shareholders utility; differentiation electricity grid;
choice meso consumption in roles regulated market
Community Neocommunitar- Solar, wind, Meso Electricity or heat Multiple models; Multiple models; Off grid and/or
ianism, participation, hydro, biomass, and for local partnerships, partnerships, user- feed to national
sustainable heat pump micro consumption and/ cooperatives, user-led; led, cooperatives or local network
communities or grid some ‘collective’ return (heat or electricity)
Household Personal Solar, wind, Micro Electricity or heat Household as owner or Multiple models; Off-grid and/or
environmental hydro, biomass, primarily for local host; direct or indirect plug and play, feed to national
responsibility, self heat pump consumption return to household company driven, or local network
reliance, autonomy microgrid (heat or electricity)
Business Corporate social Solar, wind, Meso Electricity or heat Business as owner or Multiple models; Off-grid and/or
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responsibility, hydro, biomass, and primarily for local host; direct or indirect plug and play, feed to national
business efficiency heat pump, micro consumption return to business company driven or local network
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waste to energy (heat or electricity)

 Carbon reduction, ‘the public’ and renewable energy 463
nature, and/or beneficial project outcomes (economic
and social) that are also to some degree local and
collective, rather than distant, individualised or cor-
porate in destination (Walker et al. 2007b).
The fourth mode, ‘household’, has always been
co-present to some degree with the others, extending
back to the very earliest burning of wood-fuel, peat
and agricultural wastes for cooking and heating.
Renewable micro-generation did not take any other
form until the 1970s, when solar water heating
technology started to be marketed and installed by
small businesses, primarily on the roofs of middle-
class homes or for back-garden swimming pools.
It has been estimated that 78 470 such installations
have been made in the UK over the last 30 or so
years (DTI 2006). Micro-technologies for generating
electricity also started to be experimented with, but
on a small scale and with little state support. Recent
funding programmes and policy initiatives have,
however, started to promote the diffusion of a wider
range of technologies. The Clear Skies capital fund-
ing programme set up in 2003, replaced in 2006 by
the Low Carbon Buildings programme, provided
subsidies for household installations of six different
technology types. The Microgeneration Strategy (DTI
2006) lays out a strategy for developing ‘power
from the people’, drawing on discourses of personal
responsibility to act on climate change and of self
reliance and independence from utilities. Infrastruc-
tures of technology supply, marketing and support
have begun to emerge – including through major
DIY stores – and the Low Carbon Buildings funding
has been repeatedly oversubscribed (Seager 2007).
In the household mode, the deployment of technology
is necessarily localised; however, different models of
ownership, operation, management and networking
can still be utilised. Watson et al. (2006) consider
three deployment models: ‘Plug and Play’, in which
homeowners own, finance and control the technology
themselves; ‘Company Driven’, in which the house-
holder provides the site for the technology or acts as
a host, but this is owned, financed and controlled
by a utility company and operated according to
their needs; and ‘Community Micro-grid’, in which
households in an area pool their resources and feed
into to a small local network.
The fifth mode, ‘business’, shares much in common
with the ‘household’ mode except that it is businesses
of diverse sizes and sectors – retail, leisure, manufac-
turing, farming – that are the locus of implementa-
tion, producing electricity at their own property for
their own use and/or grid supply. Business genera-
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tion has also been co-present with other modes,
extending back to the earliest applications of hydro
technologies for powering industrial processes. In
the contemporary forms encouraged by government
support schemes, a range of technologies are
being used, at meso as well as micro sizes, under a
diversity of models of ownership, management and
return. The growth of this mode has been driven in
part by business and eco-efficiency discourses, but
more recently by corporate social responsibility and
market positioning in relation to carbon reduction,
offsetting and trading.
Private supplier, community, household and
business modes of implementation all now coexist
in the UK in an evolving ‘constellation’ of co-
provisioning (Van Vliet et al. 2005, 71). Furthermore
community, household and business modes are
internally diverse containing many different possible
configurations of technology and social organisation.
Hybrid modes that further complicate and destabilise
our characterisation are also being pursued – such
as private utility wind farms in which one turbine
is owned by the community through local share
ownership.
Socio-technical heterogeneity therefore now
characterises the emerging pattern of renewable energy
implementation in the UK – and whilst the private
supplier mode vastly dominates in terms of pro-
duction capacity, other modes are becoming more
established, supported by state funding, grassroots
activism, corporate positioning and entrepreneurial
activity – and by sets of discourses that provide
legitimacy for flows of resources and for coalitions
of actors to form around different modes of
deployment.
This heterogeneity is co-producing multiple
geographies of scale, networks and institutional
relations, with implications for the spaces that
energy production is now beginning to occupy, for
the scales at which this is being organised, for the
topography of networks of interconnection between
production and consumption and for the multiplicity
of interconnected organisations and intermediaries
involved. Whilst each of these geographies merits
further exploration, it is on the emerging social
geography of public engagement with renewable
energy that we now focus.
‘The public’ and renewable energy
‘The public’ is, of course, not one thing, but plural
and differentiated, produced and demarcated in
464 Walker and Cass
different ways. Sheller (2004) uses the imagery of
‘liquid social dynamics’ to convey the sense in which
publics slip in and out of different contexts, identities
and relationships. Therefore, just as we emphasised
the heterogeneity of renewable energy as a socio-
technical category in the preceding discussion, we
similarly need to think about ‘the public’ in a way
which opens up different forms of relation between
people and technology and which allows for multiple
meanings and identities.
The five modes of renewable energy implementa-
tion we have discussed have embedded within them
a spectrum of ways in which ordinary people, or ‘the
public’ in a more general sense, may be implicated
(Akrich 1992). In Table 3, ten such roles are outlined
– captive consumer; active customer; service user;
financial investor; local beneficiary; project protestor;
project supporter; project participant; technology
host; and energy producer. Each role is characterised
in terms of spatial proximity and the degree to which
active awareness and engagement is involved. Table 4
in turn shows which of these roles are implicated in
each of the five modes of implementation, with a
distinction made between roles that are explicit in
the discursive resources and practice of each mode;
and others that may be produced or taken up in
particular circumstances.
These tables show that as configurations of
renewable energy technology and social organisa-
tion have evolved over the past 15 years, new and
distinct social roles have been produced that extend
far beyond the ‘end-of-wire’ captive consumer of
the pre-1989 energy system. There is now across
the different modes a constellation of ways in
which ‘the public’ is being produced, imagined or
mobilised. The private supplier mode redefines
customers as active consumers able to choose green
electricity and to act as investors in green funds. The
community mode imagines people as collectives
rather than individuals, participants and beneficiaries
arranged into categories of ‘the local’ and ‘the
community’. The household mode transgresses
the producer–consumer divide to redefine everyday
practice as involving both consumption and pro-
duction (Chappells et al. 2000). Across all modes,
protestors may appear as actors rejecting the role(s)
defined by system advocates and self-identifying an
engagement that resists technology development.
The existence of these multiple roles produces
the potential for a diversity of everyday encounters
and interactions with energy technology, in both an
abstract and a material sense. People signing up
Journal compilation © Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2007
for a green tariff or investing in green funds engage
with renewable energy as an abstracted and spatially
distanced category. In contrast, when acting as participants
in community projects or as household producers,
people interact with the material implementation of
specific forms and sizes of technology in a place –
the landscape, the village, the household – and with
the specific social arrangements that are applied. In
mobilising as protestors against prospective develop-
ments, people may engage both with the generality of
renewable energy as a means of energy production or
carbon reduction and the specifics of an unwanted
project in a particular location. In each of these
encounters, and across the various roles, technology
may readily take on different meanings and identities –
an anonymous engineered artefact, an expression of ethical
principle, a means of community empowerment, a com-
mercial opportunity, or a symbol of cultural defilement.
In recognising this fluidity of meaning and the
multiple social relations and spatialities involved,
some key analytical questions with significant policy
implications begin to emerge. In the space available
we can only begin to flesh out three of these.
First, how and to what extent do people – as
individuals or in social groups – differentiate between
the many different forms, sizes and social arrange-
ments of renewable energy that are available? Is there,
for example, any continuity of meaning between the
2 MW wind turbine feeding the grid and the roof-
mounted 2.5 kW turbine feeding the household, or
are these seen as substantially distinct and discon-
nected? Does the same project in technical terms
take on different meanings and generate different
responses depending upon how specific aspects of
social arrangement – such as ownership, return and
operation – are arranged and therefore different
public roles are activated or made possible? It is
claimed, for example, that projects organised under
a community model, activating roles of participant,
local beneficiary and, under some models, local
investor will generate more support and less opposi-
tion than others. Whilst there is some evidence to
support this claim, it does not necessarily hold up
under all circumstances and in all contexts (Walker
et al. 2007b). Under a similar logic, developers
operating in private supplier mode are increasingly
seeking to cast nearby publics as local beneficiaries
by devising financial packages that provide a return
to the community. Whilst advocated as a necessary
evolution of the private supplier mode (Centre for
Sustainable Energy et al. 2007), such packages can
be readily interpreted as bribery rather than goodwill
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Table 3 Public roles and renewable energy
Roles Description
Captive Pay bills to established energy supplier.
consumers
Active Actively choose between suppliers including
customers green tariffs which partially or entirely involve
renewable generation.
Service Use the services (light, heat, motion etc.) provided
users by energy generated using renewable technologies,
potentially in many different everyday settings and
forms and function of building.
Financial Invest in shareholding or interest earning
investors arrangements relating to specific projects, to the
broad financing of renewable energy projects or
to the investment choices of particular companies.
Local Receive benefits in addition to energy services;
beneficiaries financial, infrastructural, educational, technological
or intangible. Such benefits are increasingly
negotiated in formal (planning) engagement.
Project Actively object to projects through for example
protestors organisation of a local protest group, attending
meetings, writing to press, lobbying, signing
petitions etc.
Project Actively engage in similar actions to protestors,
supporters although support is typically less visibly organised
and vocal.
Project Get involved in community mode of
participants implementation, includes: membership of
organising groups; attending meetings; or hands-
on installation or maintenance.
Technology Owners of buildings or land, but not the
hosts renewable energy technology itself.
Energy Directly owns and operates generation
producers technologies.
a
http://www.reic.co.uk/generalinfo.html; b http://www.npower-renewables.com/northhoyle/;
e
http://provenenergy.co.uk/windcrofting/
Proximity to technology
End of wire. Distanced from the sources of
renewable energy dispersed through national grid.
End of wire. Distanced from the sources of
renewable energy dispersed through national
grid.
May not be spatially close to technologies,
but are explicitly so in heat networks and
household/community modes of
implementation.
Investment opportunities may be locally
restricted (e.g. REIC-backed projects in Walesa);
open to distant investors (e.g. JUICE Greenpeace-
NPower tariffs for North Hoyleb); or aspatial.
Benefits may be direct or explicitly tied
spatially through community funds
administered by local groups.
While some campaign groups (e.g. Country
Guardianc) are not spatially linked, most
protestors are focused on local projects.
Linked to local projects, tend to overlap with
participants. Campaign groups may be
spatially distant (e.g. Yes2Windd).
Explicitly linked to spatially-tied community
or household modes.
Necessarily spatially linked.
Normally proximate and part of household.
c
http://www.countryguardian.net/;
Level of awareness/active engagement
with renewable energy
All energy customers (unknowingly) consume
some energy from renewable sources.
Green tariff customers actively choose
renewable energy supply.
The derivation of the energy services may be
totally unknown to the user – or visibly,
actively and deliberately promoted as
being from renewable sources (e.g. in
demonstration projects).
Investment in renewable energy whether
personally, locally or through companies’
portfolios is generally, but not
exclusively, active and aware.
Such benefits may be visible and known
to local people, or hidden and unknown.
Carbon reduction, ‘the public’ and renewable energy 465
Protest activity is by definition aware and
actively engaged.
Supporter activity is by definition aware
and actively engaged.
Theoretically any member of a community,
in practice involvement is variable and
participation can take different forms.
Intentionally through institutional
arrangements (e.g. WindcroftingTM)e
and ‘Company Driven’ micro-gen; but
potentially less so (e.g. new owner of
a ‘hosting’ house).
Necessarily active and aware, although
may be acquired with house purchase
rather than actively installed.
d
http://www.yes2wind.com/;
466 Walker and Cass

if alternative meanings are placed on the social

producer
Energy
arrangements put in place.

X
Second, how do different roles cluster, interrelate
and interconnect? As the ten roles are not mutually
Technology exclusive but rather can be simultaneously embodied
and enacted, they may in principle interact through
host
learning mechanisms. Certainly there are assump-

X
tions embedded in policy which do envisage

X: role explicit in discourse and practice of renewable energy mode; O: other roles experienced or taken up in particular circumstances
such learning taking place. For example, one of
the motives for government support for community
participant

renewables was that work could be done on ‘hearts

Project

and minds’ (Walker et al. 2007a), improving under-

X

standing of unfamiliar technologies and making

people feel more positive about renewable energy
in general – thereby reducing public opposition to
supporter

wind farms. In terms of the roles we have identified,

Project

a learning mechanism was presumed between the

O
O

O
O
X

roles of participant/beneficiary and protestor, the former

serving to erode the latter. However, this mechanism
may well not exist if the distinctions between different
protestor
Project

modes of social organisation and between the general

O
O
O
O
O

and specific meanings of renewable energy discussed

above are paramount. The same person might quite
reasonably be a protestor against a large-scale wind
beneficiary

farm proposed by an internationally owned utility

Local

and at the same time an active participant in a

O
X
Modes of renewable energy implementation and roles for ‘the public’

community hydro project in the same locality and

producer in their own home.
Third, which people seek or are able to take up
investor

different roles in different circumstances? Questions

Green

of identity, structure and context are important in

X
X

understanding where and when different roles are

realised and who may be unresponsive or excluded
from the possibilities of particular forms of engage-
Service
user

O
O

ment. Whilst much effort has been directed toward

X
X

trying to understand the processes shaping patterns

of political resistance to, in particular, wind farm
proposals (Walker 1995; Bell et al. 2005; Wolsink
customer
Active

2007), reflecting the dominant media representation

X

of relations between public and renewables in the

UK, relatively little is known about the dynamics
and significance of other forms of engagement. The
consumer
Captive

notion of ‘energy citizenship’ envisages multiple roles

O
X

and engagements being activated (Devine Wright

2007), with the green tariff customer becoming the
micro-generating producer and the community
participant in a virtuous cycle of engagement. How-
Private suppliers

ever, it is naive to assume that everyone can take up

Public utilities

Community

these roles. Choosing a higher price green tariff,

Household
Business

investing in shares and paying the upfront capital

Table 4

Mode

costs to install micro-generation technology are

socially differentiated engagements – open to those

Area Vol. 39 No. 4, pp. 458–469, 2007

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Journal compilation © Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2007
 Carbon reduction, ‘the public’ and renewable energy 467
with sufficient income and resources, and in the
case of micro-generation those owning their own
homes, but not to others. Just as there are inequalities
in access to energy consumption (Summerton 2004),
we should equally expect there to be inequalities in
access to energy citizenship and the benefits this
brings. In this light the rhetoric of the government
micro-generation strategy, painting a picture of
‘active citizenship’ in which ‘high tech’ products
can be ‘tailored to individual taste’, providing
‘freedom and independence to the user’ (DTI
2006, 2) is an individualising and exclusive one.
Conclusion
The recent decision by the European Council to
agree a binding target of 20 per cent renewable
generation by 2020, as part of a 20 per cent carbon
reduction target, emphasises the role of renewables
in responding to climate change. This, however,
begs the question of what that 20 per cent will
consist of – which technologies, at what sizes,
through what patterns of ownership, management,
operation, return and networking, and with what
implications for the embedding of relations between
people, technology and institutions? When there
are so many possibilities for configuring what we
have termed ‘hardwares’ and ‘softwares’ across and
within the five modes of implementation outlined
in this paper, what processes and which actors are
to shape the emergent hybridity of the UK energy
system? And how might ‘the public’, situated within
the multiple roles we have identified, be embroiled
in the co-production and co-evolution of the
social and technical? Certainly these are not simple
questions of government direction. Policy interven-
tions are important and their impacts need to be
better understood, but these only materialise, some-
times unpredictably, within a dynamic socio-technical
system (Berkhout 2002; Shove and Walker 2007).
Similarly, just as governments do not have the
only ‘hand on the tiller’ (Rip 2006), we need to guard
against conceptualising individuals as having a
simplistic agency, able to autonomously perform
the roles we have identified. As Southerton et al.
(2004), Shove (2003) and others have argued, it is
necessary to take on board the complexity of the
social practices involved in shifting towards more
sustainable lifestyles, mediated through systems of
provision, if we are to develop a more realistic view
of the trajectories and possibilities of future change.
In this respect, whilst we can be positive about the
Area Vol. 39 No. 4, pp. 458–469, 2007
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Journal compilation © Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2007
grassroots commitments that are emerging around
the climate-change agenda – and specifically around
aspects of community and household renewable
energy – policy communities need to recognise that
far more than a shift in the attitudes and intentions
of individuals is required to achieve significant
carbon reductions through these means.
Against the background of dynamic technological
and social complexity, the dominant discourses,
exhortations and understandings of both policy
makers and those in the renewables industry tend
to focus on certain technology types and sizes (e.g.
large wind farms) and certain modes of implemen-
tation (e.g. private supplier), with the corollary of
addressing the public in terms of certain configura-
tions of social relations – consultation and formal
process of engagement, and increasingly financial
compensation in the form of community packages.
Whilst other technologies, scales and modes of
implementation, and other forms of relation with
renewables are now being actively supported through
policy, these moves have been driven at least in
part by an expectation that greater public support
for ‘big technology’ solutions will be produced and
by assumptions of interconnection between different
public roles. We have questioned these expectations
and assumptions and identified the need, in various
respects, for a more differentiated socio-technical
analysis of the ‘renewable energy category’. We have
also called for attention to be given to the patterns
of social unevenness and inequality which alternative
trajectories of development are likely to produce.
In our discussion such lines of inquiry have
highlighted a range of questions to be explored in
future research – including how renewable energy
technologies takes on different meanings and
associations, how publics do or do not differentiate
between socio-technical configurations, how multiple
public roles are interconnected, how learning
mechanisms operate, and how the expectations of
the public held by other actors shape technology and
system development. These are research questions
in which geography needs to be involved, integrating
analysis of space, identity, inequality, agency and
structure into our understanding of the emerging
social patterning of what might constitute a low
carbon energy system.
Acknowledgements
This paper has drawn on research undertaken in two ESRC-
funded projects ‘Community energy initiatives: embedding
468 Walker and Cass
sustainable technology at a local level’ RES-338-25-0010
and ‘Beyond Nimbyism: a multidisciplinary investigation of
public engagement with renewable energy’ RES-152-25-
1008. We are grateful for the inputs and insights of our
collaborators on these projects.
Note
1 Note that the term scale is deliberately avoided here,
having a potentially broader set of meanings (Van Vliet
2004).
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