Reducing Energy Consumption by Behavioural Change

On global as well as national levels, top-down approaches to reduce climate-related energy consumption have not been successful and effective at all until now. Thus, a bottom-up approach is recommended: citizens role should change from consumers to prosumers, to (co-)decision-makers regarding energy-related behaviour, and to co-investors in the new energy infrastructure. However behavioural change is difficult to realize in face of the ‘knowledge-behaviour gap’, ‘value-action gap’ or ‘attitude-behaviour gap’. Thus, the CODALoop project collected data with its platform Energanz and developed the socio-cognitive model for energy-related behaviour. In the new planned IF4E project that model becomes an integrated module of a process model for energy-related behavioural change with real-time feedback loops, real-time energy consumption data, and a user’s Personal Energy Profile (PEP) which is updated continuously. The challenges and risks in investigating and implementing the proposed process model in real settings for changing climate-related energy consumption behaviour are discussed. This position paper aims receiving feedback of experts regarding the planned project before its realization.