Divergent imaginaries? Co-producing practitioner and householder perspective to cooling demand response in India

Highlights: • India's residential scale DR remains an untapped area. • Practitioners perception of DR is coloured by technology saviourism. • Agency and negotiations are key issues that will determine householder's acceptability of DR. • Future residential DR policy must be driven by a co-production process. With the rise in cooling demand and the permeation of decentralised renewable energy resources in electricity networks, electricity demand-side management (DSM) has become a major tool for electricity planning and decarbonisation in the Global South. In India, the commercial application of DSM is not new, yet utility-driven residential-scale demand response (DR) remains an unexplored area. This paper contributes on two fronts – to explicate householders and practitioner's perceptions of DR: disjunctions between these perceptions and its implications for the acceptance of residential DR. Using a co-production approach, this paper draws insights from two sets of stakeholders in India - 25 DR policy and utility experts and 24 household consumers. Our results show that technological saviourism pervasively underscores practitioners understanding of DR and householder agency, a crucial factor in the adoption of DR at the residential scale remains a missing piece. The paper concludes that without considering householder agency, delivering a decarbonised future based on demand response will be challenging and consumers may remain locked into-existing socio-cultural practices that negate the adoption of DR.