Keeping the Heat On
By: Marcus Arcanjo
Tags: Energy, World, Psychology, Climate Change, Environment

When it comes to emissions and energy use, we have a tendency to point the finger at large companies and governments to make changes, often falling back on the argument that there is no point in us changing until they do.

The importance of individual actions is typically overlooked in the climate conversation but the choices we make in areas like transport, diet and household energy use have enormous impacts. In order to facilitate true societal transformations, individuals need to be at the heart of it.

How we use energy in the home contributes significantly to global emissions. In the UK, 40% of total emissions come from households and around half of household emissions are from electricity and heating.

Although these choices are so important, they remain an area that lags behind. Switching to green energy providers, installing smart meters to monitor consumption, and upgrading current technologies are all ways to reduce our individual footprints.

However, this is easier said than done. Many net-zero plans by towns, cities and countries rely on the assumption that buildings will be retrofitted. A 2015 study in Michigan focused on offering to retrofit 7,000 eligible households. The process was beneficial to energy efficiency and free, yet less than 1% of households accepted the offer. Even after significant efforts to inform households of the benefits and zero costs, acceptance of the offer only increased to 6%.

These results are interesting because they introduce doubt about useful incentives to drive behaviour change. In some circumstances — like subsidies for electric vehicles in Norway — financial benefits act as a useful incentive, but it’s not always the most important factor.

Another US energy efficiency study illustrates this point. Researchers tested the use of different messaging strategies on energy consumption over a year. Some households were sent messages that gave insights into how much money could be saved, others were sent messages about the impact of energy usage on the environment and children’s health.

Those that received messages about monetary benefits consumed the same amount of energy. Meanwhile, households receiving messages about how the pollutants from energy consumption could lead to respiratory illness in kids reduced their consumption by 18 to 30%. Again, this legitimises the view that making climate change a personal and emotional issue helps to facilitate behavioural change.

A similar approach was taken by research in the UK. In 2008, energy performance certificates (EPC) were introduced across the EU whenever a building was built, sold, or rented. Buildings were given grades (A-G) based upon a score between 1–100. Energy efficiency labels followed a colour-coded system that showed the current efficiency compared with potential, as well as the given grade.

When the researchers analysed 16,000 homes, they found that many properties were clustered at the lowest score of certain categories rather than having a normal distribution as expected. For example, they noticed many buildings had a score of 55, the lowest possible score for the D grade. This was especially prominent in homes that had recently been on the market. They concluded that many sellers had made small energy efficiency changes to move from an E grade to a D, with the expectation this would be reflected in higher property value.

In all these studies, it shows that better education is required to understand energy efficiency and this should certainly be a major focus. They also give psychological insights into how incentives drive behaviour. Whether that’s an immediate financial benefit, higher expected returns in the future from selling your house or learning how health can be improved. It’s very useful to know why people make the choices they make and what would entice them to change.

Having said that, it’s especially difficult to influence people’s home energy use. It’s much easier to understand the impact of your behaviour when you drive or fly, or when you eat certain foods, compared with when you heat or cool a building. They are much more tangible. We can see the smoke from car exhaust pipes and the fuel tank being filled when we sit on the runway, and we can touch the foods we eat.

With heating, we flick a switch or turn a dial, and the temperature changes via pipes we almost never see. To improve this, some have suggested providing showrooms to introduce consumers to smart heating, developing a database to show real-world energy performance and creating tools to compare up-front and running costs to better inform the public.

Regardless, we can’t turn our back on individuals as changemakers. The control we have over our habits is enough to make a significant global change. Taking the initiative in these areas could open the door for larger changes at the corporate and government level to follow our lead.