Is Society Ready for Long-Term Investments?—Profiles of Electricity Users in Silesia

Abstract

The objective of this article is to identify and characterize electricity users in terms of their attitudes towards energy saving. The analyses applied data from the proprietary survey conducted among the inhabitants of the Silesian Province. The respondents were asked, inter alia, about saving electricity through short- and long-term investment actions. Model types of users were defined, so that it was possible to assign the surveyed people to appropriate groups using distance measures dedicated to non-metric variables. Moreover, the user classes formed in this way were characterized; and for that purpose, the measures to study the dependence of qualitative variables—the chi-square test and the Cramer’s V coefficient—were used. As expected, it turned out that the respondents’ actions were significantly impacted by financial considerations, i.e. income, which determined the nature of the undertaken investments, and thus significantly influenced the result of the classification. However, as the research results have shown, also aspects related to environmental protection significantly differentiate the investors’ attitudes. People focused on long-term actions, aimed at reducing energy consumption, more often declare their interest in subsidies for environmental protection, spending higher amounts on energy-saving devices, or are even guided by ecological signs when doing shopping. The authors’ original contribution is the proposed segmentation of respondents and their characterization based on the obtained empirical data.