Context and background: Flexibility is not only about adapting supply to demand or switching fuel to match or meet existing temporal patterns. It is also about recognising that temporal patterns are not fixed: they vary and are in part shaped by technologies and systems of provision.

Aim: The work will conceptualise whole system ‘flexibility’ to better understand how forms of synchronisation, periodicity and duration structure mobility and other forms of energy demand. This project is a ‘theoretical engine room’ that will inform and influence research across the whole centre.

Questions and methods: Articulating the time-related implications of present energy policies and related research in science and engineering depends on integrating and mobilising concepts developed across the social sciences (Blue 2017).
This foundational work is in three phases:

a) critically reviewing methods of conceptualising and measuring flexibility across disciplines and research fields, and between supply, demand,
and the provision of energy services;

b) focussing on how forms of spatial and temporal flexibility are
structured and conceptualised in relation to transport (see 2.2.2), and domestic and non-domestic energy demand, and analysing assumptions about flexibility embedded in energy research and policy;

c) drawing on international experience and expertise, including hosting a major conference on flexibility and energy demand.

Outputs: 2 articles, 2 interactive workshops involving UK energy researchers and social scientists, and 1 international conference.

October 2018 – March 2023 .