Motives for and barriers to household adoption of small-scale production of electricity: examples from Sweden

Palm, Jenny; Tengvard, Maria

doi:10.1080/15487733.2011.11908061

Cited by 70 publications

(120 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…Two articles treated a household as one energy consumer regardless of its number of members [36,37]. Two articles problematized the fact that policy usually targets households, which often comprise more than one member having different behavioral patterns, routines, values, attitudes, etc.…”

Section: Household or Household's Members As Targets Of Information?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Who Is Behaving? Consequences for Energy Policy of Concept Confusion

Ellegård

Palm

2015

Energies

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Policies to reduce household energy use usually target the individual customer. This is probably one explanation for the limited effect of many information policies, because two concepts with different meanings are confused: individual and household. In most contexts, an individual stands for what s/he does, but in the policy context, an individual is taken to represent the entire household. This is not problematic for a single-person household, but, in a multi-person household, activities performed by different household members influence the whole household's energy use. This paper illuminates problems arising from confusing the concepts of household and individual when developing policies to reduce household energy use. Examples relate to indoor space heating and energy-intensive home-based activities. The results indicate that it is analytically simple to consider individuals at home, as well as their activities using electrical appliances contributing to heating, but much more complicated to take the whole household into consideration. Our model provides a basis for better-targeted information actions to reduce energy use. Also, empirically based models capturing variations between households with different activity patterns are important for developing policies resulting in reduced energy use for space heating in multi-person households.

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Section: Household or Household's Members As Targets Of Information?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Who Is Behaving? Consequences for Energy Policy of Concept Confusion

Ellegård

Palm

2015

Energies

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“…How energy is produced and distributed is not relevant from this point of view; the important thing is fulfilling those needs. (However, it might be relevant for the environmentally engaged person who emphasizes environmentally friendly energy production) [22][23]. The overall goal must in the end be to introduce ecologically sustainable solutions and then meet the challenge of integrating these solutions in such a way that they provide and sustain what people consider to be normal services.…”

Section: Influence Energy Consumption -Information and Feedbackmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visualizing energy consumption activities as a tool for making everyday life more sustainable

2011

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social context) they are performed. We discuss the importance of relating information and feedback to households' everyday activities, in order to make it relevant to households. Through our method we discover and visualize activity patterns in a household during a given period. The method is also useful to households as a reflective tool when discussing families' daily lives in relation to energy consumption. The method gives direct feedback to households and the information is relevant since it emanates from their own reported activities.

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“…From a household perspective, it can also be important to make an economically rational choice of heating system that can be justified to friends and neighbors; when the choice has been made and the technology has been installed, it is also vital that the decision be confirmed and accepted by others (Henning, 2000;Palm and Tengvard, 2011). However, the assumption that households make such rational choices is difficult to empirically verify; for example, according to Mårtensson and Frederiksen (2005), although electric boilers are usually classified as the most costly alternative when both up-front costs and operating cost are considered, they are the most common heating system in smaller houses in Sweden.…”

Section: Energy Choices Made In a Social Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This indicates that what is deemed rational from a technical or economic perspective may not necessarily be rational to the individual user (see also Bartiaux, 2008;Palm and Tengvard, 2011).…”

Section: Energy Choices Made In a Social Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

The building process of single-family houses and the embeddedness (or disembeddedness) of energy

Palm

2013

Energy Policy

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People building their own houses have, at least theoretically, substantial autonomy when choosing, for example, a heating system and windows. In this article, focus is on the process of building new single-family houses and how energy efficiency and energy-efficient technology are incorporated into the building process. The conclusions emphasize energy as only one factor in housing purchase decisions. It is a big challenge to make low-energy building important to consumers. Consumer preferences for new products are unlikely to fully develop unless individuals have the opportunity to interact with them. It is difficult for consumers to know what to ask for if they lack experience of energy-efficient technologies. In the studied cases, the building codes and established standards became extremely decisive for how energy issues were included in the process. There is a need to change the design of incentives so as to make the least energy-efficient choice the most expensive. The most 2 energy-efficient solution should be standard, and if the buyer wants to depart from that standard and build using less energy-efficient construction, then that should cost more.

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Motives for and barriers to household adoption of small-scale production of electricity: examples from Sweden

Abstract: A new concept for small-scale electricity production attracted massive media attention in

Cited by 70 publications

References 14 publications

Who Is Behaving? Consequences for Energy Policy of Concept Confusion

Who Is Behaving? Consequences for Energy Policy of Concept Confusion

Visualizing energy consumption activities as a tool for making everyday life more sustainable

The building process of single-family houses and the embeddedness (or disembeddedness) of energy

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