ABSTRACT
The new millennium has seen an increasing interest in citizens as energy end-users. While much hope has been placed in more active energy users, it has remained less clear what citizens are able and willing to do in shaping new technology. An investigation into inventions and modifications to S-RET conducted in Finland revealed a surprisingly high amount and depth of innovative activity. Over 200 inventions or modifications by consumers have been made to S-RETs, such as heat-pump, solar, and wood pellet-burning technologies. These inventions improved either the efficiency, suitability, usability, maintenance, or price of the S-RET systems. The analysis further clarifies that users are able to successfully modify, improve, and redesign almost all the subsystems in these technologies. The rationale for user inventions is based on the fact that supplier models do not sufficiently cater for the geographic location and house-specific variation in weather, material, aesthetic, and regulatory conditions, which leaves the local design space for users to improve their S-RET systems unexplored. In addition to expert evaluations, life-cycle carbon assessment was performed on selected user inventions, verifying their positive climate contribution.
The innovation activities of consumers support the proliferation of sustainable energy technologies in contexts where institutional and technology characteristics are not yet fully developed for the wide proliferation of S-RETs. Further analysis focused on how consumer-created technology solutions diffused. Their existence adds to solution variety, but do others adopt their solutions? The findings show that 2.7% of the consumer innovations diffused through commercial channels and 8.2% diffused through their straight adoption by peers. A significant share of projects (34.1%) were, however, part of “innovative peer diffusion” adoption that included adaptations and further modifications carried out among peers. Innovative consumers’ efforts to diffuse their solutions remain at a low level and indicate directions for platform development, by which these solutions may spread more widely. Taken together, the analyses counteract the false assumption that users can only make low-tech add-ons, as well as the equally untenable hope that citizen users could take over the design of renewables altogether if only given the chance and incentivized properly.
The actions of a typically small group of inventive users are embedded in and supported by the activities of a broader user base in internet communities, and it may be that the greatest import of user innovators does not lie in the innovations themselves but in the sharing of competence that these inventive users do among peers, the topic interrogated in Chapters 4 and 5.
