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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ENERGISE (European Network for Research, Good Practice and Innovation for Sustainable Energy)

Teaser

Summary

ENERGISE is an innovative pan-European research initiative to achieve a greater scientific understanding of the social and cultural influences on energy consumption. ENERGISE develops, tests and assesses options aimed at transforming the quality and quantity of energy use among households and communities across Europe.

ENERGISE recognises that cultural change is a key ingredient in successful energy transitions. Societal norms and routines with regard to work, education, family life, consumption and recreation greatly determine our patterns of energy use as well as our ability and/or willingness to change those patterns. Without a comprehensive understanding of these practice cultures, public policy measures to reduce energy consumption at the individual or household levels are likely to fail.

ENERGISE develops a Living Labs approach to directly observe existing practice cultures related to energy consumption in a real-world setting and to test both household and community-level initiatives to reduce energy consumption. A comprehensive review and classification of household and community energy initiatives from 30 European countries provides the foundation for the development of two prototype â€˜ENERGISE Living Labsâ€™ designed to address the dynamics of individual and collective energy consumption. Data collection before, during and after the implementation of 16 Living Labs in 8 partner countries will be instrumental in contributing to the design and assessment of future energy consumption initiatives across Europe.

ENERGISEâ€™s primary objectives are to:
- Develop an innovative framework to evaluate energy initiatives, taking into account existing social practices and cultures that affect energy consumption.
- Assess and compare the impact of European energy consumption reduction initiatives.
- Advance the use of Living Lab approaches for researching and transforming practice cultures.
- Produce new research-led insights into the role of household routines and changes to those routines towards more sustainable energy.
- Encourage positive interaction between actors from society, the policy arena and industry.
- Effectively transfer project outputs towards the implementation of the European Energy Union

Work performed

To date, the ENERGISE project has made substantial advancements towards achieving its overall aims and objectives. All 27 Deliverables falling due in the first 18 months of the project were completed and submitted to the EC, many of which are available on the ENERGISE project website. The 12 project Milestones for this period were also achieved. Some of the main results achieved to-date include the development in WP1 of an innovative theoretical framework for the ENERGISE project that fuses various practice-theoretical and culturalist perspectives. In WP2, the ENERGISE team have completed a systematic criteria-guided review and classification of more than 1000 existing sustainable energy consumption initiatives from 30 European countries (EU-28, Switzerland, and Norway), and related typology development of sustainability energy initiatives. The database of initiatives is freely available on the ENERGISE website (http://energise-project.eu/projects). A review of the current state of the art and existing trends in national energy policies, energy systems and energy campaigns was also carried out for each of the 30 countries featuring in the online database. WP2 completed with a summary of policy implications of results, as well as corresponding recommendations that feed into project summary (WP7) and policy reports (WP6).

Guided by the ENERGISE conceptual framework (WP1), and building on the classification and synthesising work carried out in WP2, the ENERGISE consortium identified sustainable energy interventions for testing in ENERGISE Living Labs (ELLs) (WP3). The design of the ELLs are further informed by feedback from the project\'s Expert Panel (advisory board) and Policy and Decision Forum (consisting of representatives from business, policy and NGO sectors), interviews with practitioners based in partner countries, inputs from ENERGISE team members and partner organisations, as well as a review of the relevant literature. The ELLs focus on reducing energy use in two sets of mundane practices, space heating and laundry in households. Pre-testing of the ELLs took place at a workshop in Helsinki, which was attended by 12 energy experts and 22 project partners. The methods, techniques and tools for ELLs and their timing were developed and presented to partners in an easy-to-use ELL engagement guidebook, and an evaluation and assessment manual was produced to facilitate a sustainability assessment of the ELLs.

Altogether 16 ELLs, engaging 320 households, are to be implemented in eight European countries in the second half of 2018 (WP4). Each ELL partner in the ENERGISE consortium has identified and recruited local implementation partners and developed an implementation plan detailing how they will approach and carry out the ELLs in their respective countries. An online monitoring platform, which incorporates a number of data collection tools including the sustainability assessment toolkit developing in WP3, is currently in the final stages of development and will be used along with other research techniques to capture data for analysis in WP5.

A review of the state of the art concerning energy policy integration in the EU, focusing on the integration of social science and humanities within EU energy research and policy-making, was conducted in WP6. Central to the review is the application of the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries, which is employed to analyse prevailing approaches to integrating knowledge from social sciences with energy research and policy-making in the EU.

The findings of the project have been disseminated to a variety of stakeholders (WP7) through a number of channels including conference presentations, workshops and clustering events, publications, the ENERGISE newsletters and other targeted newsletters, press release distribution, organised meetings, flyers, ELL implementing partners, social media and national and central project websites.

Final results

The ENERGISE project has made significant conceptual and methodological advances such as the development of a new theoretical concept of â€˜practice culturesâ€™, which integrates practice-theory with cultural perspectives and recognises the importance of ruptures and routines in energy use. Additionally, a comparison of energy cultures within and across countries has generated new insights into cultural conventions underpinning energy use. These findings have been central to the theory-guided design of Living Labs, which aim to reduce energy use in households while co-creating knowledge on why energy-intensive practices are performed and how they depend on the context in which they are performed.

ENERGISE has undertaken extensive synthesising work involving over 1000 cases of sustainable energy initiatives, which has resulted in the development of two distinct typologies of sustainable energy consumption initiatives that explore and highlight aspects of, and differences in, approaches to sustainable energy consumption. The 1067 initiatives collected from across 30 European countries are mapped in an online database, providing a valuable resource for policy-makers, practitioners and researchers.