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Are households with pro-environmental behaviours more likely to undertake residential energy efficiency audits? Evidence from Canada

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Abstract

Residential energy efficiency improvements have a great potential to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Evidences suggest that there is an underinvestment in residential energy efficiency improvements, pointing out the existence of “energy efficiency gap”. To address this in Canada, the government has introduced home energy efficiency audit programmes since 1998, to encourage homeowners to get their homes audited professionally for energy efficiency and implement recommended upgrades. Using the 2011 and 2013 Household and Environment Surveys, this paper investigates whether household environmental behaviours have played roles in determining household participation in these audit programmes during the last 10 years. To the best of our knowledge, no study in Canada has examined the association between household participation in other pro-environmental activities and energy efficiency audit programmes. We find that pro-environmental behaviours such as water conservation, composting, recycling, participation in unpaid conservation activities, purchase of green goods, carrying own grocery shopping bags and lowering heating temperatures in winter nights are good predictors of household participation in energy efficiency audit programmes. Given that these other pro-environmental activities demonstrate environmental awareness of the households, our results suggest that besides the financial incentives, a more strategic and holistic approach to environmental programmes is both needed and possible when designing policies addressing residential energy efficiency gap.

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Notes

  1. The data included payments made in 2013 although the financial incentive programme was in place only up to end of 2017. This is because homeowners have up to 18 months, after the initial audit, to implement the recommended upgrades and submit application for rebates after having a second audit that confirms the improvements.

  2. These figures do not include the amounts disbursed before 2007 under the preceding programme known as EnerGuide for houses. The figures are based on summary of incentive payment reports obtained from Natural Resources Canada.

  3. The figures are based on summary of incentive payment reports obtained from Natural Resources Canada.

  4. Households have to pay about $300–$350 to get their homes audited (Gamtessa 2013; Rivers and Shiell 2015). However, in some cases, provincial and local government subsidies reduced the effective costs that the homeowners have to pay for auditing (Hoicka et al. 2014).

  5. See Hoicka and Parker (2011) and Hoicka et al. (2014) for the analysis of the effects of the Canadian energy-efficiency retrofit programmes on energy saving and GHG emission reductions.

  6. Generally, pro-environmental behaviours refer to “purchase choice, product use and post-use, household management, collective, and consumer activism behaviors, reflecting some degree of environment-related motivation” (Peattie 2010).

  7. This statement refers to studies that are specifically using data on programmes involving energy efficiency audits. However, there are a number of studies that utilize data from participation in utility sponsored demand side management programmes not involving audits (e.g. Hartman 1988; Joskow and Marron 1992; Eto et al. 1996).

  8. Stated preference data are collected in experimental or survey situations where respondents are presented with hypothetical choice situations.

  9. The two programmes are identical despite the differences in their names, particularly in terms of the requirement to get pre- and post-retrofit audits by certified professionals as well as the sliding scale of energy savings associated with the undertaken upgrades applied in determining the amounts of rebates that each participant is eligible based on completion of the recommended upgrades.

  10. In the combined 2011 and 2013 HES dataset, about 72% of those who reported having home energy efficiency audits during the past 10 years had made changes due to the audits.

  11. Generally, modelling actual upgrades rather than the intensions to upgrade expressed through first audit would be difficult in the absence of information about the net financial gains (the upfront costs of the upgrades accounting for the potential flow of resulting energy cost savings). Despite having the intentions, potential net financial gains are the ultimate constraints for implementing the recommended upgrades and their omission in the regression model would cause severe omitted variables bias.

  12. It should be noted that the purchase of energy efficiency bulbs is subsidized in some provinces. For instance, in Saskatchewan, SaskPower partners with local retailers, twice a year, to offer discounts on a variety of energy-efficient lighting products, including CFL and LED bulbs.

  13. Testing for the equality of coefficients on the lower income and lower education categories indicated that they could be aggregated.

  14. On the other hand, this could be related to free ridership on government subsidy for energy efficiency activity, which is measured based on the difference between household willingness to pay for the upgrades and the costs of energy efficiency retrofits (Alberini et al. 2016; Eto et al. 1996; Grösche and Vance 2009; Grösche et al. 2009; Joskow and Marron 1992). Accordingly, the percentage of the recipients of government subsidy for whom their willingness to pay exceeds the costs of the upgrades determine the percentage of the free-riders among the recipients.

  15. Authors’ calculations based on database available online at http://oee.nrcan.gc.ca/corporate/statistics/neud/dpa/showTable.cfm?type=CP&sector=res&juris=ca&rn=27&page=0

  16. Natural gas furnaces account for about 80% in Saskatchewan, 65% in Ontario, 50% in Manitoba and British Columbia, while the figure for Canada is 75%. The main heating energy sources in Atlantic Provinces are electricity (40%) followed by propane (32%).

  17. See https://www.efficiencyalberta.ca/residential/

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  1. Department of Economics, University of Regina, Regina, SK, S4S0A2, Canada

    Samuel Gamtessa & Harminder Guliani

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  1. Samuel Gamtessa
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Correspondence to Samuel Gamtessa.

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Gamtessa, S., Guliani, H. Are households with pro-environmental behaviours more likely to undertake residential energy efficiency audits? Evidence from Canada. Energy Efficiency 12, 735–748 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12053-018-9702-0

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