Shifting patterns – The patterned enactments of flexible electricity consumption by Norwegian households

Based on semi-structured interviews with 20 households, this study explores how households interpret their possibilities to time shift their electricity consumption. Drawing from the concept of flexibility capital (Powells and Fell, 2019), we illustrate the patterned nature of flexibility work. We complement this with an analysis of how people enact time shifting in micronetworks that include people, artifacts, infrastructure, knowledge, and institutions (Sørensen et al., 2000). We identify four types of micronetworks that show that households interpret and domesticate flexible consumption in a variety of ways. First of all, most households with high flexibility potential did not see their advanced energy technologies as useful for time shifting consumption and thought that time shifting is meant to be done by others in society. Meanwhile, many households with lower flexibility potential found time shifting consumption meaningful, interpreting it as rescheduling dishwashing and laundry. The findings imply that there is a need to account for whether households view the technologies they possess as useful for flexibility work; in other words, whether these technologies are understood and enacted as flexibility capital. The study discusses the possibility that many households with high flexibility potential may be indifferent to price incentives for time shifting. Additionally, the findings highlight that households are actively constructing the situated meaningfulness of time shifting. It is important that professional communities acknowledge the variety of interpretations of what time shifting is about instead of seeing these as just overflows of the dominant smart grid logic.