Electricity engineers and the happening of behaviour: lessons from a real-scale experiment

This paper addresses the question of the constitution of behaviour and its effects on the observers and on those observed, in the case of a ‘direct load-control’ experiment in the electricity sector in France. Typical of the rise of the behavioural approach to understanding demand in the electricity sector, that experiment lasted seven years and involved several hundred households. It aimed at sorting out human behaviours from that of heating systems and of buildings in order to prepare for ‘demand-response’ market designs. The paper proposes to consider behaviour as happening. Speaking of the happening of behaviour takes inspiration from performance art and serves to emphasize two crucial elements. First, it indicates that behaviour is more the product of a staged performance of those observed, than of a classical scientific instrumentation of an external reality. Second, it refers to the element of surprise that such a performed behaviour provokes on the part of observers. The surprise belongs to a quite different world from that of the machine-like action and well-delineated unit of the behaviour. Speaking of the happening of behaviour is a way to hold together two contradictory takes on life: that of the richness of the singular experience and that of the powerfulness of the generalized abstraction.