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This week marks the publication of another output for the project as Aimee’s article, based on the Walking with Energy pilot study, is published in Futures. The article shares some of the data gathered during the first Walking with Energy event held as part of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Festival of Social Science in November 2018. The event saw members of the public take a guided walk along 1.5km of Sheffield’s district heating pipeline, tracing it to its source at the Sheffield Energy Recovery Facility (ERF), a large energy from waste plant on the edge of the city centre. The facility burns 400,000 tonnes of waste annually to generate heat for a local heat network and electricity for export to the grid. The participants were interviewed as they walked through the energy landscape and after their access all areas tour of the ERF. We asked them how they felt about what they were seeing, hearing, smelling and feeling and about their evolving relationship with energy over the course of their lives. Their responses were sometimes surprising. One participant remarked that the experience felt:
“kind of edgy. I feel like a sort of urban explorer.” (M,24)
Another participant offered an instructive illustration of how intangible our relationship with energy has evolved to become: “I’m a retired GP and I worked in a [coal] mining village so most of the people there were miners and once a month or whatever, the miners had a free coal allowance but rather than deliver it to each individual house they’d just pile it up in the middle of each little side street and people went out and shovelled it back in. So you used to know exactly where your fuel was coming from. You might even have dug it out yourself. It couldn’t be more different now.” (M, 68)
The tour of the ERF really made its mark on participants and caused some to reflect quite profoundly on their disconnection with their own consumption and the lack of influence they have over how their energy is generated.
“Personally seeing all the waste is quite a sobering thing coming face to face with the consequences of our over-consumption really isn’t it, seeing our waste pouring into a pit like that.” (F, 36)
“It’s made me think […] I’m not happy with gas heating. I would prefer something renewable, more like this but it costs such a lot to convert it. It’s not something you get a say in unless you have a lot of money. I would feel better if I was on the heat network as I would know that gas wasn’t being extracted to heat my home.” (M,45)
The article considers questions such as: how might we overcome our disconnection with where our energy comes from? Why is it important to do so? And can embodiment (I.e. being in the energy landscape and first hand encounters with energy generation) help? I conclude that embodiment of this nature has the potential to reconnect us with energy and feel our place in the industrial, natural, economic and political systems that underpin its production. This is the hypothesis that we have taken forward into the Walking with Energy project with the support of the Swedish Energy Agency and our colleagues at Lund University.
You can access the article here: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1aW0b3jdJahYP or contact the team for a PDF.