News

As a result of the Coronavirus pandemic we have sadly had to suspend our planned walks for the Spring and Summer of this year. We are really disappointed as we had some great walks planned both in the UK and Sweden. We will be aiming to reschedule these for the Autumn, providing it is safe to do so. The walks we have planned include exploring the district heating and energy recovery infrastructure of Nottingham and Sheffield, along with similar explorations of Landskrona and the Sofielund district of Lund in Sweden. We also hope to conduct a walk at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, where they have installed biomass and hydro energy generation.

 In the meantime we are progressing with other aspects of the Walking with Energy project. We are working on an academic output which uses oral history techniques to understand our changing relationship with energy over the last 50 years in Sweden and the UK. We are also progressing a sub-study comparing citizen engagement mechanisms (related to heat and energy) in the UK and Sweden. Finally, we hope to publish very soon a bespoke Walking with Energy map produced by the art and design studio du.st in Sheffield. We look forward to sharing this and further updates soon.

We hope you are staying safe and well in this challenging time.

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.

October saw the activity on the project gather pace as we continued to refine our methods and begin to collect data. I travelled to Sweden to help our project partners at Lund with an event we held as part of Lund University’s ‘Future Week’. Our event was hosted by the International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics (IIIEE) and involved a ‘Cafe Discussion’ on heating today and in the future. We explored participants’ own experiences with heating and sought their views on how we generate heat now and how it should be generated in future in the future.

As part of the event the participants visited the basement of the IIIEE building to learn about the heat exchanger that transfers heat from the external district heating pipes to the buildings own heating system. The opportunity to see this source of heat and its inner workings up close provided valuable insights for the participants. Given the differing levels of knowledge and experience that were held by the multi-generational set of participants, it helped to generate interesting discussions around how we can heat our buildings. Sustainability was at the heart of these discussions around future energy but there was no clear consensus as to what pathway held the most promise.

Learning about the heat exchanger at the International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics

Alongside the café discussion and visit to the heat exchanger, we also piloted the Implicit Association Test (IAT) that has been developed for this project. The IAT measures the strength of associations between concepts. For this project we are interested in comparing associations between fossil fuel sources and other energy sources (such as solar, wind, energy from waste). These associations are thought to link to the implicit beliefs of an individual, in contrast to, for example, questionnaires that measure explicit beliefs.

Completing the IAT

My trip also gave me the opportunity to hear about the plans for our next two walking tours. The first one, on the 14^th November will be in Brunnshög, which is a new neighbourhood in Lund. The world’s largest low temperature district heating system has been developed here and provides a fascinating location for this walk. Our second walk in November will take place on the 28th in the Sofielund district of Malmö. We’ll provide a further write up of these events in later in the month.

Written by Stephen Parkes

On the 14th October we continued the development of the Walking with Energy methodology with a walking tour of Sheffield’s district energy network as part of the Realising Just Cites conference funded by Mistra Urban Futures.

A full account of the event has been published on the Realising Just Cities website and is available here: https://realisingjustcities-rjc.org/blog/feeling-heat-tracing-sheffields-district-energy-network-its-source.

Until the 1970s, home heating was a physical task. Heat came from a supply of solid fuel that had to be carefully managed. Some 50 years later, most of us control our heat with buttons and dials, and play no direct role in its generation. So while we might be conscious of how much money we’re spending, do we really know how much fuel gets used when we press or twist, and what is being burnt to generate it? That reduction in awareness is an example of ‘energy invisibility’. My research has been looking into its implications not just for individual households, but for society’s response to climate change.

In 2017, I led a research team that recorded oral histories of home heating in the Yorkshire area. What we found was that prior to gas central heating, fuel was managed by eye. Heating the home was a laborious and multi-sensory experience. Some people missed aspects of building and maintaining fires, and the control it gave them over their heating costs. But others loved the comfort and cleanliness of central heating. The changes that our participants talked about represent the most significant energy transition in living memory. But for all its benefits, the move to gas central heating has made us less prepared for the next big transition: the shift away from carbon. Climate change confronts us with big decisions, both at domestic level and at policy level. So we need to move from a passive, largely ignorant relationship with energy to an active and engaged one. Energy needs to become visible to us again.

In 2018, we tried something new. We led a group walk along Sheffield’s district heating pipeline to help re-engage locals with one of the sources of their energy. The walk led us to the Energy from Waste (EfW) plant, which burns waste to provide heat for hundreds of buildings in the city. Very few Sheffielders know what the EfW does, so it’s a good example of energy invisibility in action. That made it the perfect place to reconnect people with one of the sources of their heat.

Our public engagement model could help reverse passive attitudes to energy consumption, and bring more citizens into debates about energy policy and climate change.

But our event wasn’t just about the location. There’s also evidence that this kind of walking activity can promote learning and engagement. A number of academics argue that research should be embedded in the landscape it is concerned with. And others that say we learn better through first hand encounters. For example, Grégoire Wallenborn and Harold Wilhite (2013) argue that changing our energy practices relies upon ‘experiences and experiments in which bodies are explicitly involved’, and that ‘exposure to new experiences can be an important change agent for practices’. Another major influence on Walking with Energy is the concept of ‘practical learning’ advocated by Jean Lave (1991), who argues that ‘practical’ or ‘first hand’ experiences offer the greatest scope for us to reassess and adjust dispositions that are embedded in past experience.

During the Sheffield walk, we found that participants went from a position of relative apathy to holding strong views on the EfW by the end. And they weren’t just telling us whether they thought the plant was good or bad – crucially, they were also giving us informed reasons why. We’re now developing this as a model of how first hand encounters can help reconnect people with energy and promote greater environmental citizenship. So while buttons and dials are here to stay, there’s a chance we can encourage people to think beyond them, and make their voices heard in the debate about our energy future.

Written by Aimee Ambrose

This article was previously published in May 2019 by Sheffield Hallam University – https://www.shu.ac.uk/research/in-action/projects/curing-energy-invisibility