The ethics of energy provisioning: Living off-grid in rural Wales

The transition to renewable energy means a new energy subjectivity is emerging. The “green” energy consumer may now harness an array of socio-technical practices: prosumption, green energy sources, feed-in tariffs, Smart metering etc. This article presents data about three off-grid energy systems in the UK: a small-scale solar-PV system set up in a dwelling at an ecovillage; a mixed hydro-electric and Solar-PV system that served an off-grid household; and a large hydro-electric power system that supplied electricity to an entire ecovillage of nine households. In off-grid contexts there is frequent temporal and seasonal energy abundance, tempered by the perennial problem of how to store electricity. The synchronization of everyday and domestic practices with the rhythms of power generation thus defines an off-grid energy ethics. This article argues that the new off-grid energy subjectivity shows many characteristics of self-governance that are attributed to the emergent green pro/consumer, and can therefore provide insight into the partiality and rhetorical framing of the green energy consumer. Living off-grid is imagined by its practitioners in ethical terms, at the forefront of a timely reconfiguration of industrialised societies' moral relationship with energy.