Abstract
Today’s electricity supply and energy access provide the foundation for health, education, economic growth, and societal development. There are manifold interconnections between individual well-being and our energy system. We are currently witnessing an energy transition, a transition towards more sustainable energy sources and uses, and this shift will also greatly impact on human well-being in multiple ways. This transition may involve more (or less) decentralized energy technologies, the transfer of funds (within a society, or internationally), and so forth. However, the impacts this transition may have on individual well-being are not well studied. The interconnection between well-being and energy systems is, in fact, rarely spelled out. Although there are various indicator sets for sustainable energy, most of these fall short of explicating the connection between (sustainable) energy and individual well-being, and most citizens, irrespective of their educational level, are not aware of the multifaceted impacts the energy system or the energy transition may have on their personal well-being.
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Notes
- 1.
For a detailed historical account of sustainability see Grober 2013.
- 2.
In energy systems the three pillars are often reduced to energy costs, eco-friendliness, and security of supply. We will elaborate further in the course of this section.
- 3.
The first paragraph of the Energiewirtschaftsgesetz, the law that manages electricity and gas production, transport, and supply, makes reference to the three goals: the purpose of the law is a “reliable, cost-effective, consumer-friendly, efficient and environmentally friendly (…) energy supply” (EnWG, 2017).
- 4.
Among other things, there is quantitative monitoring of energy parameters by the German government (the so-called Energiewende-Monitoring, the Fortschrittsberichte, etc.) and an (academic) expert commission that comments on these numbers and interprets them.
- 5.
From a practitioner’s perspective, the so-called design for sustainability exploits advantages of combining the design approach with sustainability considerations, see http://www.d4s-de.org/manual/d4stotalmanual.pdf
- 6.
This is why ethical subjectivism cannot deal with the widely held belief that sometimes human beings do not know what is best for them (cf. Nussbaum 2000).
- 7.
- 8.
These numbers take into account the accidents in Fukushima Dai-Ichi and Chernobyl, as well as the great disaster at the Banqiao dam, China, in 1975.
- 9.
The Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz (EEG) in its original form ensures that electricity from renewable resources can always be fed into the grid and is guaranteed a fixed price, the ‘feed-in-tariff.’
- 10.
The homepage can be reached here: https://www.naturschutz-energiewende.de. Detailed information is currently available only in German.
- 11.
The SAIDI measures the average duration of outages for an electricity customer in a given energy system in minutes or hours per year. Internationally, Germany has the lowest SAIDI with typically less than 30 min per year (Bundesnetzagentur 2017).
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Hillerbrand, R., Goldammer, K. (2018). Energy Technologies and Human Well-being. Using Sustainable Design for the Energy Transition. In: Fritzsche, A., Oks, S. (eds) The Future of Engineering. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 31. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91029-1_11
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