The making of energy consumers: from mutual provisioning to mass markets and beyond

This chapter critically engages with the concept of the energy consumer, which is often assumed to be an uncontroversial and self-evident category in research and practice. Drawing on recent humanities and social science research, historically and geographically contingent manifestations of energy consumers are highlighted. As well as considering how ideas of the energy consumer took shape within distinctive socio-material arrangements, the chapter explores the diverse roles consumers took on within systems of provision. This narrative moves through periods of mutual provisioning, to mass consumption, to decentralised co-provision or ‘prosumption’. In so doing, the chapter raises new sets of questions about the energy consumer that have been largely neglected in conventional energy studies, including: how we understand the construction and continuation of socio-spatial differentiation in user roles, what the reconfiguration of sustainable energy practice entails and how active civic engagement might be restricted in an energy systems context.