People reactions to load shedding signals. Peak pricing and load control experiments

Résumé En

Faced with the challenges of energy transition, governments and private actors have supported, developed and experimented with a number of technical, economic, or social incentives for change in behaviour in the service of objectives of efficiency, flexibility or energy sobriety. These incentives meet the logics of household action. The diversity of reactions to an intervention is often seen as the product of differences in attitudes from one consumer to another, while the difference between attitudes and behaviours is usually explained by the persistence of cognitive biases, unconscious habits or the effects of systems beyond the individual will. In fact, it appears that the articulation of the attitudes, practices and material equipment of households consists of energy projects, although varied, but nevertheless intelligible, giving off both keys to understanding reactions and accompanying avenues of incentives. They shed light on the limited potential for practice transformation and explain why the energy transition does not occur in as unified and coherent a way as public discourse would like.