Energy and Behaviour: Towards a Low Carbon Future

Approx.527 pages

Approx.527 pages

• Language: English
• Publisher: Academic Press
• Release date: Nov 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9780128185681

Book preview

2018:127–160.

Chapter 1

Energy and behaviour: Challenges of a low-carbon future

Marta Lopesa,b; Carlos Henggeler Antunesb; Kathryn B. Jandac    a Polytechnic Institute of Coimbra—ESAC, Coimbra, Portugal

b INESC Coimbra, DEEC, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

c Energy Institute, Bartlett School of Environment Energy and Resources, University College London, London, United Kingdom

Abstract

A global effort is currently underway to combat climate change and adopt actions for a sustainable low carbon future. Energy and Behaviour: Towards a Low Carbon Future presents an international and multifaceted approach to understanding the interface of people and energy, which involves both engaging people in the energy system and changing the energy system to better accommodate people’s needs. This introduction focuses on the moving target of what low-carbon energy behaviours are and could be, not just in European countries but worldwide. It sets the scene for the book by providing a brief review of energy and behaviour research and defining what the editors hope to achieve in the book. Next, it delivers a guided tour of the chapters. Finally, it concludes with a call for action to move beyond the conventional boundaries of energy and behaviour research.

Keywords

Energy and behaviour; Energy efficiency; Interdisciplinary approaches; Buildings; Transportation; Industry; Smart city; Modelling; Policy; Regulation

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the people who helped to make this edited book possible, in particular all the authors for their contributions, Inês F. Reis for her assistance during the revision process, and the supportive team at Elsevier. We also would like to acknowledge the support of the project grants UID/Multi/00308/2019, ESGRIDS (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-016434), MAnAGER (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-028040), and Learn2Behave (02/SAICT/2016-023651), from the Energy for Sustainability Initiative of the University of Coimbra and from the Bartlett School of Environment Energy and Resources at University College London.

1 Introduction

A global effort is currently underway to combat climate change and to adopt actions for a sustainable low-carbon future. Under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the 2015 Paris Agreement has set a goal to limit the rise in average global temperatures to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels (UNFCCC, 2019). All over the world, governments, national authorities, and other stakeholders from civil society and the private sector are being called to implement measures to limit greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and adapt to climate change.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has recognised that anthropogenic GHG emissions are mainly driven by the population size, economic activity, human lifestyle, energy use, land use patterns, technology, and climate policy (IPCC, 2014). Many measures to limit GHG relate to the energy system, which can be viewed at different scales from global to local. These measures include efforts to change both how societies produce energy (called the ‘supply side’) and how societies use energy (‘demand side’). Most future projections focusing on energy systems forecast that roughly half of the low-carbon solution will come from decarbonising energy supply and half can be created by reducing energy demand through a combination of energy efficiency and behaviour change (OECD/IEA, 2018).

Energy efficiency is often construed as using better technology to deliver the same level of energy service with less primary energy. It is thought to be easy to quantify, and there are a number of studies outlining the energy efficiency ‘gap’ between what is and what could be (Hirst and Brown, 1990; Dietz, 2010). Behaviour change, however, is tricky. What a ‘better’ behaviour is depends on many factors, including whether one is trying to avoid waste through ‘conservation’ (c.f. Black et al. (1985), Gardner and Stern (2002), Karlin et al. (2014), Peters (2019)), define appropriate limits through ‘sufficiency’ (Princen, 2005; Darby and Fawcett, 2018; Bertoldi, 2019), or pursue fairness and equity for vulnerable socioeconomic groups (Hall et al., 2013).

Europe has committed to lead on global climate action, and the European Commission adopted a strategic vision to achieve net-zero GHG emissions by 2050 (EC, 2018). All economic sectors have a significant role to play in the energy transition, and the European strategy recognises and strengthens the central role of engaging the public, as end users, consumers, and citizens (EC, 2018). The transition towards a decentralised power system based on renewables will require a smarter and more flexible energy system, built on end users’ individual and collective involvement as energy consumers and producers (Geelen et al., 2013). In addition to being increasingly important in the energy supply system, people and organisations have always been and will continue to be vital players in energy demand, which is the raison d’être for this book. Ultimately the European strategy acknowledges that moving to a net-zero GHG society will require people to change their daily lives, the way they work, move, consume, and interact socially (EC, 2018).

In this book the authors investigate the evolving relationship between energy and behaviour to move towards a low-carbon future. However, as the title of this introduction emphasises, there are some significant challenges in moving a field of thought from one that focuses mainly on technological substitution to one that pursues an integrative approach to fundamental social change. For those readers with a quantitative orientation, we point to ecological economist Herman Daly’s insight: what really counts is often not countable (Daly, 1991). We hope a book that acknowledges and explores this ongoing tension in the field and that will be an important resource for researchers, graduate students, practitioners, and policy-makers.

This introduction focuses the reader’s attention on the moving target of what low-carbon energy behaviours are and could be, in not only European countries but also worldwide. It sets the scene for the book by providing a brief history of energy and behaviour research and defining what the editors hope to achieve in the book. Next, it delivers a guided tour for readers. Finally, it concludes with a call for action to move beyond the conventional boundaries of energy and behaviour research.

2 The role of energy and behaviour in moving towards a low-carbon future

To provide some background for the book, we tackle two important topics. First, we provide a brief history of the energy and behaviour literature, identifying the paths that have been travelled thus far and noting challenges that have yet to be addressed. Second, we outline the book’s major contributions to this literature.

2.1 A brief history of energy and behaviour

Although people are central to the energy system, the idea of an ‘energy behaviour’ is still evolving and somewhat contested. How societies are motivated to use or conserve energy has been a topic addressed sporadically by social scientists for more than a century (see Rosa et al. (1988) for a review of the historical literature). A complete review of the energy and social science literature since its resurgence due to the oil crises of the 1970s is beyond the scope of this introduction. However, a recent meta-review of the literature from 1999 to 2013 shows that the field has dominantly focussed on the supply side (Sovacool, 2014).

When energy demand is investigated, a variety of research patterns emerge. Wilson et al. (2015), for example, investigated energy demand from four different viewpoints, including a physical, technical, and economic model (PTEM); an energy service approach; social practice theories; and sociotechnical transitions theory. These authors found that each approach provided a window onto a complex landscape, but none provided a complete explanation for historical trends nor a comprehensive basis for predicting the future. Together, however, the evidence shows that understanding energy demand is a sociotechnical problem rather than one that is either social or technical.

This introduction singles out two strands in the existing energy demand literature for further discussion: the physical-technical-economic model (Lutzenhiser, 1993) and individualisation (Maniates, 2002).

2.1.1 The PTEM and its limitations

According to Lutzenhiser (1993), energy efficiency research has long been dominated by the physical-technical-economic model (PTEM) that assumes people make economically rational decisions about the physical and technical environment they live in. Thus they will automatically invest in more efficient technologies when it is cost effective to do so, according to predefined (statistically characterised) patterns. Research in this vein assumes that people are fully rational utility maximisers, given their budget constraints (Lutzenhiser, 1992; Wilson and Dowlatabadi, 2007).

However, there is strong evidence of behavioural inconsistencies due to cognitive limitations and psychological biases that individuals face when making decisions, which are explored by behavioural economists (Mundaca et al., 2019) and psychologists. Psychology contributes to the understanding of personal determinants (e.g. intentions, attitudes, norms, beliefs, and values) and contextual influences that shape energy behaviours, facilitate or hinder the adoption of energy-efficient technologies, and predict people’s acceptability of energy policies and infrastructural changes (Abrahamse and Schuitema, 2019). Beyond psychological factors, people may seek to produce and reproduce other qualities in the world around them such as comfort, cleanliness, or convenience (Shove, 2003). These qualities can be seen as social or cultural constructs, rather than attributes belonging to a particular individual or technology.

2.1.2 Individualisation and a counterpoint

Energy behaviour is often characterised as a set of individual actions that influence energy consumption and production (Lopes et al., 2015). For example, the International Energy Agency describes energy behaviour as ‘all human actions that affect the way that fuels (electricity, gas, petroleum, coal, etc.) is utilised to achieve desired services, including the acquisition or disposal of energy-related technologies and materials, the ways in which these are used, and the mental processes that relate to these actions’ (IEA-DSM, 2015). In terms of energy consumption, for example, this may include people purchasing new energy-consuming goods and services; whether they repair, maintain, and improve energy-consuming devices (or don’t); and how they use equipment, buildings, and transportation. Moreover, climate conscious consumer choices will drive the market towards products and services with low-carbon footprints (Stern et al., 2016).

Definitions focussed on individuals have been considered narrow, and a broad interest in the behaviour of actors in all segments of energy system is emerging (Stephenson et al., 2015). These include, but are not limited to, organisations, communities, and middle actors (Janda and Parag, 2013; Janda, 2014; Parag and Janda, 2014). Another counterpoint to individualisation is social practice theories. These hold that people have social practices that are not determined exclusively by individual choices (whether economic or noneconomic). Instead, social practices are framed by sociotechnical assemblages. In the case of cleanliness, for example, Shove (2003) has shown that social norms for showering have increased dramatically over the last few generations. This is not only the result of individual choice but also a confluence in the relationship between indoor plumbing, hot water provision, the number of bathrooms, and a host of social discourses about sanitation and social order, pleasure, duty, and nature.

The definition of an ‘energy behaviour’, therefore, depends on who is studying this phenomenon, how they study it, and what they hope to achieve. Much of the current literature defaults to assuming this term means individual actions in homes, leaving groups, and their dynamics in businesses or industry comparatively understudied (Moezzi and Janda, 2014; Stern et al., 2016). This book addresses individuals at home and also moves beyond them, as discussed in the succeeding text.

2.2 Contributions to the literature

Energy and Behaviour: Towards a Low Carbon Future presents an international and multifaceted approach to understanding the interface of people and energy, which involves both engaging people in the energy system and changing the energy system to better accommodate people. Contributors (1) introduce the major disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to this field; (2) provide cross-sectoral perspectives on the challenges in residential and nonresidential buildings, industry, transport, cities, and energy communities; (3) critically review evolving modelling approaches to address this sociotechnical challenge; and (4) address new areas where additional evidence is required for interventions and policy-making.

There are five ways that this book contributes to the literature and to the field more broadly.

First, it supports a broader definition of ‘behaviour’ than the individualised one. In this book, ‘energy and behaviour’ is broadly understood as the role of people, organisations, and technology in energy use. As the authors in Part I show, ‘people’ may be individuals, groups, or society.

Second, the book explicitly and deliberately seeks to expand the field beyond studies that tend to focus on people in their homes. Part 2 of the book contains six chapters that were commissioned to move beyond the usual focus on homes and homeowners to look at people and decision-making in nonresidential buildings, transportation systems, industrial organisations, and cities.

Third, the book includes an explicit focus on modelling in Part 3, including quantifying energy behaviour and decision modelling. The integration of quantitative approaches to energy behaviour is notable because other recent initiatives have fostered a more qualitative approach (e.g. Foulds and Robison, 2018; Hui et al., 2018; Fahy et al., 2019). We believe there is complementary value in modelling tools to gain insights about problems, design methodological approaches to derive effective solutions, and assess the upscaling of interventions.

Fourth, the book challenges the ways in which policies have been designed to be both generalisable and targeted to specific barriers. Authors in Part 4 of the book address these issues and begin to chart a way towards integrative policies that incorporate both behaviour change and technological change, rather than one or the other.

Finally, for readers new to the field, we have developed what we hope is a useful Appendix of resources, such as most relevant international conferences, programmes, and journals in the ‘energy and behaviour’ field. We provide this information both as a historical resource and one for future growth. From a historical perspective, we have included the initiation dates of various conferences and journals to show that much of the early energy and behaviour research appeared in conference proceedings (e.g. the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy summer study started in 1980). The proceedings are available online but not indexed on the Web of Science. In a world dominated by the Internet searches, we wish to remind readers that, prior to 2006, there was no journal specifically dedicated to energy efficiency and that the premier journal focussed broadly on energy and social science began only in 2014. The energy and behaviour field is still evolving, and we invite readers who are interested in its development to visit the Appendix. We hope the Appendix conveys a further sense of the depth and breadth of this landscape and will help readers navigate their contributions to its evolution.

3 A guided tour to the book

This book is structured in four parts, plus an Appendix. Part I introduces disciplinary approaches on energy and behaviour with views from psychology, behavioural economics, and the social sciences. It provides an introduction to the study of energy and behaviour, as well as showing there is not a single accepted approach to this topic. Part II explores different aspects of energy and behaviour research across different energy end-use sectors ranging from households, nondomestic buildings, industry, transport, and smart cities. Because it is important to recognise that energy and behaviour research can be quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods, Part III presents an overview of several quantitative approaches to energy and behaviour, including modelling. Part IV reflects on opportunities and challenges to implementing energy and behaviour change in the real-world including policies and programmes.

3.1 Part I—Understanding energy behaviour: Disciplinary approaches and beyond

Part I contains three chapters, each of which takes a different theoretical approach to energy and behaviour. It starts with a psychological approach from Abrahamse and Schuitema (2019) and then moves to Mundaca et al. (2019)’s economics-based assessment of behavioural strategies. It concludes with an interdisciplinary call to action from Moezzi and Lutzenhiser (2019), which expands the frame beyond disciplines focussed on individual actions (psychology and economics) to a broader sociotechnical spectrum, looking at the relationship between technologies and society at different levels. Even though they are not located in this section of the book, other chapters also consider individual behaviours in the context with other institutional factors. These include Figueroa and Lah (2019), Mourik et al. (2019), Darby (2019), Oliveira et al. (2019) and Heiskanen et al. (2019).

Abrahamse and Schuitema (2019) provide an overview of research from psychology on household energy consumption. Their chapter describes the motivations for people to save energy at home and the main drivers of adoption rates of new energy-saving technologies. Then, it explores how to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions to encourage energy conservation behaviours and discusses research on the acceptability of energy policies and infrastructural changes.

Mundaca et al. (2019) review, analyse, and discuss various policies and research encompassing economic and nonmonetary factors affecting energy use and decarbonisation efforts from a household consumption-based perspective in Scandinavia. The chapter introduces behavioural economics and its applications in this context, critically analyses policy mixes targeting sustainable energy use and decarbonisation in Scandinavia, presents case studies that investigate economic and noneconomic factors affecting energy use and decarbonisation activities, and derives policy implications.

Moezzi and Lutzenhiser (2019) provide a counterpoint to the first two chapters. They discuss the limitations of the individual behaviour frame for multidisciplinary work and point to the need to see intersections of people, energy, and technology at multiple levels, especially given the scale and scope of climate policy goals. They remind us that people do not only purchase, use, and maintain technologies but also ‘design, produce, sell, maintain, regulate, and collectively shape technologies’. The chapter proposes developing more formal interdisciplinary methods for energy research and development, especially for engineers and social scientists working together.

Questions we hope this section will raise for the reader is what is energy behaviour? Who is ‘behaving’ and why? Finally, where are the actions occurring? Abrahamse and Schuitema (2019) and Mundaca et al. (2019) both focus their research on households rather than business, industry, or transport. Moezzi and Lutzenhiser (2019)’s approach could be applied to households, businesses, transport, or industry. In the next section, we address places of energy consumption that go beyond households.

3.2 Part II—Energy behaviour across sectors

As noted earlier, much of the traditional energy and behaviour research has directed towards individual people at home (Moezzi and Janda, 2014; Janda, 2014; Stern et al., 2016). This section contains six chapters that stress the multiple locations where energy and behaviour matter, not only in housing but also in nondomestic buildings (Bernardo and Martins (2019); Arning et al. (2019)), industry (Palm and Thollander, 2019), transportation (Figueroa and Lah, 2019), community level energy production (Mourik et al., 2019), and smart cities (Darby, 2019).

Bernardo and Martins (2019) discuss the intertwined relation of behaviours and technology in nondomestic buildings. The chapter provides a broad context from the perspective of buildings’ life cycle, explores the behavioural issues affecting the buildings’ energy performance, and discusses the role of building automation and control systems and also the design requirements of human-technology interaction. It concludes that interdisciplinary cooperation among members of research teams is required for energy-efficient building design, coping simultaneously with technological and behavioural issues and their interrelations and privileging occupant-centred approaches.

Arning et al. (2019) present an empirically based decision-making process model of energy-efficient refurbishment investments, which compares the decision process of investors in residential and in nonresidential buildings. The chapter highlights the impact of intermediaries and their role in renovation decisions concerning (non)residential buildings to identify the most promising levers for policies supporting a more rapid transition towards a sustainable building stock. Recommendations are derived about how to promote the diffusion of low-carbon energy-efficient refurbishment measures in the building sector.

Palm and Thollander (2019) outline the major principles for energy efficiency and energy management in industry and discuss how to develop the energy management perspective with theories from the social sciences focusing on how situated actions, tacit knowledge, and social networks can influence decision-making. The aim is to develop new insights contributing to existing research on energy efficiency in industry exploiting the synergies between different fields, which can also be used by practitioners. The chapter proposes an energy management model, which should be adjusted to the local context, focusing on the importance of knowledge and communication, offering guidelines on how to implement sustainable values, routines, and behaviours in a way that energy efficiency becomes embedded in industrial organisations.

Figueroa and Lah (2019) provide an overview on the policies and actions that can facilitate a collective transition and supportive human response to the adoption of changes towards a decarbonized transport sector. The chapter discusses the increasing energy demand for transport, reviews the opportunities and cobenefits that facilitate transport decarbonisation, outlines changing conditions affecting human dimensions and energy for transport, discusses synergies between actors and collective community approaches and the role these may play to facilitate scaling up policies and solutions, and derives recommendations.

Mourik et al. (2019) investigate how institutional arrangements at EU and national and local levels influence business models for community energy projects. The chapter presents community energy projects, such as community virtual power plants, discussing the underlying community logic, providing case studies, and exploring how energy project business models can be community centred. It further examines how existing policy, regulation, and ways of doing influence these energy community business models and how they may influence the energy system restructuring in the long run.

Darby (2019) discusses the challenges brought by the spread of ICT into everyday city life. The chapter presents the ‘smart city’ concept and reviews relevant lessons from energy studies, regarding not only opportunities but also challenges associated with affordable energy services, security and privacy, control, accountability, and resilience. Questions to research and to smart city initiatives are derived.

3.3 Part III—Modelling energy behaviour

The third part of this book contains four chapters focussed on various aspects of quantitative energy and behaviour research, which this book presents as complementary to the qualitative approaches taken by other authors in this volume and elsewhere (e.g. Foulds and Robison (2018), Hui et al. (2018), Fahy et al. (2019)). Grunewald and Diakonova (2019) use mixed methods (high-resolution electricity use patterns coupled with time-use information) to understand household demand in a social context; Hong et al. (2019) demonstrate several modelling tools and datasets to explore the influence of occupants in energy performance of buildings, Chappin et al. (2019) use agent-based tools to model the social dynamics of energy end use, and Oliveira et al. (2019) discuss different preference elicitation approaches to support energy-related decisions.

Grunewald and Diakonova (2019) expand the focus of household analysis from mere electricity use patterns to include underlying social activity patterns, since units of energy and money alone are insufficient to understand the dynamics of energy demand. The chapter presents a new type of time-use data collection method (interactive app rather than paper diary) to understand the relationship between activities and their electricity footprint, which can help to develop more effective means to engage energy users and to reshape their demand. Reported enjoyment of activities offer insights into strategies to reshape demand. The authors present electricity consumption patterns for the most common activities and how these differ at times of electricity system peaks.

Hong et al. (2019) introduce state-of-the-art methods, tools, and datasets for quantifying occupant impacts on building energy use and occupant comfort. The chapter offers an overview of how occupants can influence building environments and energy performance and highlights gaps in the abilities of building energy simulation programmes to represent these influences. State-of-the-art methods and modelling tools that enable more sophisticated occupant behaviour simulation are reviewed, along with the most prominent datasets available to support quantitative behaviour model development. An overview of application areas for occupant behaviour modelling tools and datasets across the building life cycle is presented, with case studies. The chapter identifies opportunities and challenges associated with occupant behaviour simulation to support the design and operation of low-energy buildings that foster greater occupant satisfaction.

Chappin et al. (2019) review the opportunities and challenges offered by agent-based model (ABM) approaches for understanding the social dynamics of energy end use. The chapter discusses the ability of ABM to capture heterogeneous, boundedly rational, and imperfectly informed behavioural factors at the individual, household or businesses, and neighbourhood levels, including the use of microgeneration and local storage. Three archetypal case studies of ABM are reviewed: energy efficiency in domestic heating, electric vehicle adoption, and energy management in smart grids. The importance of ABM in the context of multidisciplinary studies of energy behaviours is emphasised.

From a decision science perspective, Oliveira et al. (2019) present three preference elicitation approaches used in energy decision contexts: multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA), conjoint analysis, and problem structuring methods. The potential of these approaches for structuring and supporting energy-related decisions is illustrated through several applications, namely, the assessment of initiatives to promote energy efficiency using a combination of soft systems methodology (a problem structuring method) and ELECTRE TRI (an MCDA method based on the exploitation of an outranking relation devoted to the sorting problem). Other applications reviewed include the evaluation of policies to foster the development of smart grids in Brazil, using the Delphi method and ELECTRE TRI, and the modelling of consumer preferences for electric vehicles, using choice-based conjoint analysis.

3.4 Part IV—Promoting behaviour change

The fourth part of this book reflects on what it takes to change energy behaviours to promote a more sustainable world. It contains four chapters. Heiskanen et al. (2019) review behaviour change interventions highlighting the confounding influence of context to generalise behaviour change efforts, Reusswig et al. (2019) present results from a behaviour change intervention in Berlin, Bertoldi (2019) provides an overview of the market barriers to energy efficiency and European Union policies designed to overcome them, and Peters (2019) presents a historically grounded overview of US energy behaviour programmes.

Heiskanen et al. (2019) review behaviour change interventions aiming to support energy conservation and evaluate how context is taken into account in the most popular intervention types, such as convenience, information, feedback, and social influence. The authors also explore how context, namely, organisational, geographical, and practice, is likely to influence intervention outcomes. Based on this exploration the authors suggest how to better address contextual factors in sustainable energy interventions.

Reusswig et al. (2019) explore the interplay between consumers and citizens in the transition to low-carbon cities. The chapter reports the results of a 1-year urban real-world lab experiment in the capital of Germany, Berlin, with households reducing their personal carbon footprints by using various types of feedback, including a weekly carbon tracker. The authors consider the ethical and political dimensions of the experiment and make policy recommendations.

Bertoldi (2019) provides a summary of the main energy-efficient barriers and discusses policies to address energy efficiency and energy conservation, such as energy and carbon taxes, personal carbon allowances, and energy-saving feed-in tariffs. European Union policies for sustainable behaviours in energy end use are presented and conclusions are provided.

Peters (2019) provides an overview of the US energy programme landscape outlining the role of government, states, utilities, and private sector market actors in seeking to influence behaviour change by end users. The chapter discusses how behaviour has been integrated into the three most common types of energy programmes offered to end users in the United States: energy efficiency, demand management and pricing, and market transformation programmes. She concludes with recommendations for the future of behaviour change in energy efficiency programmes in the United States.

4 Conclusions and next steps

This book shows that energy behaviour can be influenced at both the individual and societal levels, but effectively addressing their influence on the energy system requires making the underlying theoretical frameworks explicit (MEN, IPEEC, and IEA, 2018). The contributions in this book show that different disciplinary fields address energy behaviour differently, through approaches that are sometimes complementary and sometimes competing (Lopes et al., 2012; Moezzi and Janda, 2014; Moezzi and Lutzenhiser, 2019).

Economics and psychology share a common focus on individual choices and provide policy prescriptions seeking to influence those choices (Sorrell, 2015). Going beyond the individual perspective of energy behaviours, social sciences such as sociology and anthropology argue that energy is a means to provide useful services that enable normal and socially acceptable activities to be carried out as part of the daily life (Wilhite, 2008; Strengers, 2012). Hence, energy demand is not a consequence of individual decisions but a reflection of the social organisation in which rules, practices, and routines are embedded (Moezzi and Lutzenhiser, 2010; Shove and Walker, 2010).

Many policy strategies for promoting energy efficiency and reducing energy demand have focussed on technology development, regulation, financial incentives, and information provision (Stern et al., 2016), which are strongly influenced by the PTEM framework and an individual perspective. Decades of behaviour change interventions in Europe have not yet succeeded in achieving long-term and significant improvements in energy efficiency and energy demand reduction (Gynther et al., 2011; EEA, 2013). In fact, emerging research is disclosing that, when behavioural interventions are focussed narrowly on individual actions, the effects are uncertain and only deliver marginal short-term benefits (Mundaca et al., 2019). When aiming to reduce energy demand and GHG emissions, the most promising actions are those having higher impacts when considering both technical potential (i.e. the amount of reduction) and behavioural plasticity (i.e. capability of delivering effective behaviour change) (Stern et al., 2016).

Going through this book, relevant conclusions can be drawn on the interplay between energy and behaviours towards a low-carbon future, which should inform future work in this field. These include but are not limited to the following:

•the need to move beyond the usual scale of disciplinary problem solving and redesign the sociotechnical energy system (rather than redesigning individual technologies or expecting to change people’s behaviours);

•the importance of interdisciplinary work and close cooperation between all stakeholders (e.g. researchers, policy-makers, industry, businesses, middle actors, interest groups, and other organisations). This should be developed in real-world practice rather than idealised in theory;

•the value of modelling tools to gain insights about problems, design methodological approaches to derive effective solutions, and assess the upscaling of interventions;

•the opportunity for reengineering regulations and integrating policies while maximising cobenefits to society, leveraging citizen participation, and fostering interactivity.

Transitioning to a low-carbon energy system is not simply a matter of changing fuel sources. It implies profound and large-scale transformations in the sociotechnical energy system and how people fit in and interact with it and each other (Sorrell, 2015; Darby, 2019). Thus finding alternative paths will require innovative interdisciplinary work, at all scales, bringing together engineering, economics, environmental, social, and political sciences (Stern et al., 2016; Darby, 2019; Abrahamse and Schuitema, 2019). More than a challenge that lies ahead, interdisciplinary work for a more sustainable low-carbon future offers the opportunity to design more participative and effective development strategies on a global scale. This book is a contribution to better understanding each other’s perspectives to reach this end. Our hope is that the book as whole will serve both as a primer for new entrants in the energy efficiency and behaviour field and a critical resource for researchers, postgraduate students, practitioners, and policy-makers.

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