Target setting and the role of consumer behaviour – ask an expert

EiD recently wrote Dr Sea Rotmann, the Operating Agent for the IEA DSM Implementing Agreement Task 24 [Closing the Loop – Behaviour Change in DSM: From Theory to Policies and Practice] and asked her:  Given the role of behaviour in affecting energy demand, how can governments ever agree to a binding target for energy savings?  If they did, it would have to be very conservative to account for any behavioural “slack”.   But, even when you have a minimum energy performance standard for a specific appliance, the total energy consumption can vary because of consumer behaviour.

Hi Rod

Regarding your difficult but very pertinent question:

Yes, it would be extremely hard to take behaviour into account when designing a binding target, due to issues like the 100s of cognitive and social biases (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases if you ever feel overly optimistic and need a reality check on how complex our behaviours really are), economic effects such as rebound, prebound, freeriders and spillover and the grand role of habits, which may actually make up 90-95% of our energy-using behaviours and which can not be tackled by simple rational interventions such as information and incentives alone…

However, you are also certainly correct in saying that knowing the minimum performance standard of a building, appliance or vehicle does not mean that there can’t be massive variability due to the behavioural component (I can think of examples where behaviours led to up to 400% variability between trials that installed the same technology).

So – what to do? I think in order to ensure that the importance of behaviour is finally tackled and taken into account when making such policy decisions, you do need to add at least 5% behaviour change on top of any binding target (I’d go for 10% as a stretch target) – for example, between 2-5% energy savings is what we get from ongoing behaviour change in smart meter feedback trials. You can get up to 15% ongoing average fuel reduction with changing eco-driving behaviours, especially in commercial transport businesses. Buildings – depending on what kind of building we are talking about I think up to 25% is absolutely a possibility (especially in commercial buildings).

The whole behavioural wedge is estimated to be around 30%, but that of course isn’t all easily accessed. So, from little more but some educated guesswork, I’d put 5% on top of technological efficiency improvements. Once you evaluate for the behavioural component and design better interventions accordingly, you can most likely up that number. The important thing is that we start including the behavioural component in our target setting, as well as our designing, implementing and evaluating policies and programmes targeted at reduced energy use. I simply do not believe that technology does improve energy efficiency in complete isolation of the human component, and in most cases, behaviour will have a greater effect on both improving or reducing technological efficiencies.

Hope that helps!

Sea