Abstract
This article claims that the contents of energy conservation information policy instruments must be better adapted to household members’ everyday life experiences in order to capture their interest and transform information into action. The article elaborates on how to ground energy policy information in the everyday doings and strivings of households. Using two time-geographical concepts, i.e. activity and project, we investigate how people understand and define their energy-related activities as parts of overarching everyday projects with a focus on the constraints on energy conservation. The analysis is empirically based on interview data from a case study of households’ use of renewable heating technologies. The results illustrate how peoples’ heating activities are related to everyday projects such as reducing environmental impact, comfort for a convenient daily life, the household budget balance, learning about and/or maintaining home technologies and hobbies. One conclusion is that information instruments focusing solely on one or two such projects might hamper the translation from information to action and also limit the number of people interested in or able to access the information. Another conclusion is that the growing use of energy-efficient technologies might influence new habits and perceptions of the everyday use of energy, making common economic motives for saving energy less useful. Anchoring energy-related information and support in the everyday activities and projects of households would facilitate the translation process. If this is achieved, information could prove a useful instrument in the broader reorganization of societal institutions in a sustainable direction.
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Notes
A household consists of one or more individuals living together in a dwelling. The household as such is a category, not an actor in its own right. The individual household members are the actors who influence what is measured at the household level.
Lindén et al. (2006) distinguish four categories of relevant policy instruments: information, economic (e.g. taxes, pricing and emission trading), administrative (e.g. legislated regulations) and physical (e.g. technical improvements intended to influence energy conservation). These instruments can be combined in various ways; for example, smart meters are a physical instrument that can be used to inform households about their energy use.
In this limited description, we have not considered the other activities (in addition to those concerning the heating system) of which each project is constituted. For example, creating indoor comfort, besides involving the heating system, is realized by means of activities such as putting on clothes, closing doors and lighting candles and by using material objects such as building envelopes, all of which point towards alternative or complementary ways of performing the project. Such knowledge is relevant to developing/constructing information and support as well as to encouraging alternative or complementary ways of performing projects.
An in-depth analysis of how the respondents learned to handle the renewable heating system is presented in “Learning for lower energy consumption” (Isaksson 2014).
The study by Klintman et al. (2003) about household members’ reasoning about their choice of heating system revealed similar tendencies among some respondents who converted to district heating.
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Acknowledgments
This research is part of the programme Sustaining Everyday Life–Information instruments for sustainable resource use in households based on daily activity pattern analysis, funded by the Swedish Research Council Formas.
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Appendix
Appendix
District heating (DH)
Interviews | Women | Men |
1 | Simon | |
2 | Albert | |
3 | Robert | |
4 | Patrik | |
5 | Tomas | |
6 | Eva | |
7 | Axel | |
8 | Rita | |
9 | Jakob | |
10 | Olof | |
11 | Peter | |
12 | Oskar |
Bed rock heating (BH)
Interviews | Women | Men |
1 | Stina | |
2 | Sven | |
3 | Karl | |
4 | Malin | Martin |
5 | Per | |
6 | Folke | |
7 | Inga | Ingemar |
8 | Filip | |
9 | Rolf | |
10 | Johan | |
11 | Anders | |
12 | Bo |
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Isaksson, C., Ellegård, K. Anchoring energy efficiency information in households’ everyday projects: peoples’ understanding of renewable heating systems. Energy Efficiency 8, 353–364 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12053-014-9299-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12053-014-9299-x