The home-power movement and the assumptions of energy-policy analysis

Ethnographic study of the rapidly growing home-power movement, a movement involving electric power production at the home site mostly from photovoltaic systems, reveals strong associations with environmental values and with a desire to reformulate work roles and the human interactions of community life. As a part of this movement, both the adoption of radical energy efficiency measures and the choice of electricity supply systems more than twice as expensive as traditional sources go well beyond traditional models of consumer behavior. These characteristics of the movement suggest important questions about energy policies that rely on the assumption that traditional patterns of energy-related behavior are close to optimal and need only be examined at the margins. The decision making processes of movement participants also suggest a more formidable capacity for integrating the complex implications of energy choices into coherent action than is generally ascribed to ordinary consumers. In all of these respects, the movement appears to have implications for energy policy making out of proportion to the number of home-power homes (about 25,000) in place in the U.S. as of August 1989.