What remains flexible? Energy demand and the limits of reduction

📅 May, 5th, 2026

🕘14h - 16h

📍Amphi 2 - André Marie Ampère, EDF Lab Paris Saclay (7bd Gaspard Monge 91 120 Palaiseau)

🗣️Event in English

📝Open to everyone, without registration

Households are often understood to have significant scope to reduce their energy demand. Yet many perceive their consumption to be already at a minimum, even as recent energy crises have prompted further efforts to reduce and adjust use. This raises the question: what remains flexible? Approaching energy demand from a practice perspective, this talk discusses flexibility not as question of consumption levels, but through ‘meta-services’—the arrangements through which daily practices such as heating, mobility, and cleanliness are coordinated. Under conditions of strain, this flexibility may extend beyond routines to housing arrangements, including relocation and moving home. From this perspective, the capacity to reduce energy use further depends less on individual choice than on how everyday life is organised. If possibilities for further reduction are exhausted, energy vulnerability emerges not only as a matter of insufficient resources, but as a consequence of the limits of flexibility in everyday practices. This challenges policy approaches that assume untapped potential for flexibility and highlights the need to address the conditions under which energy vulnerability emerges, such as housing markets and the infrastructures that shape what can and cannot be changed in daily life.
 

Bio 
Jenny Rinkinen is an associate professor in social sciences at LUT University, Finland and her work focuses on the intersection of consumption, technologies, and everyday life with specific interest in energy demand. She is currently leading her Research Council Finland Fellowship project Entanglements of multi-locality and energy demand, which looks at energy demand as a spatially dispersed phenomenon rooted in social practices. Jenny has published in the fields of sociology, consumer studies, sustainability science and social scientific energy research. Her books include Conceptualising demand: A distinctive approach to consumption and practice (Routledge, 2020) (co-authored with Elizabeth Shove and Greg Marsden) and Energy Fables (co-edited with Jacopo Torriti and Elizabeth Shove). She is the deputy director and the Head of Doctoral Studies at the Department of Social Sciences at LUT University.