First steps towards a deeper understanding of energy efficiency impacts in the age of systems

摘要

So far technologies have been mostly conceived as silver bulletsentering seamlessly into everyday life without any subsidiaryeffect on other technologies and in general on ideasand practices. One of the consequences of this mindset isthat energy analyses are typically performed by assessing theenergy impact of single energy end-use technologies duringtheir lifecycle without paying much attention to the effects oftheir interactions with other technologies and with the dailypractices they are embedded in. Such an approach may leadto wrong estimates of technologies overall energy impact andoften it does not allow identifying those cases in which energyefficiency improvements (EEI) boost higher energy consumption.This is particularly the case in the present historical situationwhen most of our daily activities rely on the employmentof an increasing number of different devices consumingcommercial energy and when all these devices end up withbecoming a system whose overall energy performances dependsmore on how all its energy using components interactthan on the energy efficiency of each component. This paperaims to provide a series of insights concerning EEI impactsbased on practice theory, actor-network-theory and complexadaptive systems theory whereby technologies are viewedboth as elements of daily practices and nodes of a network oftechnologies interconnected by these practices (e.g. refrigeratorsare viewed as part of practices related to eating, drinking,cooking, shopping, and as such linked by these practicesto technologies used for food preparation, food conservation,food transportation, etc.). Besides presenting a differentperspective to analyse EEI impacts, this paper illustratesthe epistemological implications of considering technologiesas part of larger systems and explains how the point of viewproposed may allow identifying important drivers of energyconsumption.