Local authorities (LAs) hold the potential to play a climate leadership role, showing responsibility by cutting emissions and associated energy use from within their own estates. To date, LAs have predominantly focussed on energy efficiency or supply side measures. However, current and future changes in the workplace environment – towards open plan offices, hot desking and flexible working for example – offer alternative avenues to reduce the energy demanded by employees.

A focus on employee needs and work environments opens up new research questions: How are demands for energy shaped by current and future working environments? How are changes in workplace practices effecting the energy demanded of buildings? It also offers the potential to create more comfortable work environments. And leads to the question: Can simple changes to practices or environments deliver comfort and reductions in energy demand?

Re-thinking Energy Demand is a co-creation project between researchers at the University of Exeter and Devon County Council. By explicitly looking at the social and technological contexts which shape routine energy consumption the project aims to build local authority capacity to develop successful strategies for energy demand reduction within its office buildings. The project is led by Karen Bickerstaff, Catherine Butler, Jake Barnes (University of Exeter) and Alastair Mumford (Devon County Council).

The research aims to co-produce a set of resources for Local Authorities that a) provide new insights into the social, technical and cultural factors shaping internal energy demand problems, and b) influence the policies and strategies used by local authorities to reduce energy consumption.

The project will run from February to December 2017 and is funded by an ESRC Impact Acceleration grant.

“Whilst we are all agreed that the council needs to save energy and money, the means of doing so are less clear and harder to achieve. A lot of attention focusses on the installation of energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies like insulation and biomass heating systems. Meanwhile an understanding of people’s influence on energy demand are frequently overlooked, which can be a much cheaper to tackle. This collaborative project offers the opportunity to re-think and explore how we understand energy demand, as well as seek new ways to tackle energy demand reduction.”

Alastair Mumford (Corporate Energy Manager at Devon County Council

This project builds on prior research undertaken by Karen Bickerstaff and Catherine Butler on (a) the everyday social and technological contexts that shape energy consuming practices, and (b) the effectiveness of a range of low carbon policies that focus on changing individual behaviours. The primary focus of this research was on households and how to effect change in domestic energy consumption. Crucially, this project seeks to apply and develop insights to promote change in the non-domestic sector – specifically Local Authority sites.

More broadly, there has been significant academic and policy attention directed at understanding energy use and reducing demand in household settings. Far less attention has been directed at non-domestic buildings - currently accounting for around 18% of UK carbon emissions – which represent very different sites of (collective) energy consumption.

Meanwhile demand reduction is a high-level priority for local authorities (for a range of environmental, social and economic reasons), but progress has been very slow. Conventional modes of behaviour change, based primarily around raising awareness, are being viewed with growing scepticism and critique because they have largely failed to deliver transformative change. The research literature is also clear on this matter: evidence demonstrates that the provision of information alone is a very weak predictor of behavioural change. Existing research on workplace settings specifically points to a need for more sustained attention to the multifaceted and contextual drivers of employee behaviour and highlights the importance of meaningful engagement with employees in efforts to save energy.

Key research articles

• Bickerstaff, K., Hinton, E. & Bulkeley, H.A. Decarbonising at home: the contingent politics of experimental domestic energy technologies, Environment and Planning A. 2016.
• Bickerstaff K, Devine-Wright P, Butler C (2015). Living with low carbon technologies: an agenda for sharing and comparing qualitative energy research. Energy Policy, 84, 241-249.
• Tweed C, Dixon D, Hinton E, Bickerstaff K (2014). Thermal comfort practices in the home and their impact on energy consumption. Architectural Engineering and Design Management, 10 (1-2), 1-24.
• Bickerstaff K (2013). Climate change, human security and the built environment. In Grasso M, Redclift MR (Eds.) Handbook on Climate Change and Human Security, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 361-361
• Butler, C. Parkhill, K. A. Shirani, F. Henwood, K. Pidgeon, N. (2014a) Examining the Dynamics of Energy Demand through a Biographical Lens, Nature and Culture, 9 (2): 164–182
• Butler, C. Parkhill, K. A. and Pidgeon, N. (2014b) Energy Consumption and Everyday Life: Choice, values, and agency, Journal of Consumer Culture, 19: doi:10.1177/146954051455369
• Pidgeon, N. Demski, C. Butler, C. Parkhill, K. Spence, A. (2014) Creating a National Engagement Process for Energy Policy, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(4): 13606-13613
• Demski, C. Butler, C. Parkhill, K. Pidgeon, N. Spence, A. (2015) Public Values for Energy System Change, Global Environmental Change, 34: 56-69

Collaborative in design, this project seeks to:

1. collectively develop understanding and insights into the social, technical and cultural factors shaping internal workplace energy demand problems
2. co-create new strategies for local authorities (LAs) to reduce energy demand whilst ensuring workplace comfort.

The project will run from January to December 2017 and will be conducted in three principal phases:

Phase 1: Understanding current practice and challenges

To better understand local authorities’ current energy demand challenges and approaches to on-site demand reduction a brief survey will be distributed to local authorities in the southwest. The data collected will be used to form a baseline of activity and understanding.

Phase 2: Deliberative focus groups

Deliberative focus groups kindly sponsored by DevonNorse.

Six focus groups will be held with Devon County Council employees to explore their opinions on different aspects of the workplace environment such as room temperatures, lighting or office layout: what makes an office comfortable or uncomfortable? How has this changed over time? How could offices change in the future? The focus groups will also explore practical individual and collective strategies to manage the work environment in ways that ensure comfort and reduce energy demand.

The focus groups will also be designed to explore key concepts, principles and strategies developed in relation to domestic demand reduction, to better understand their application in organisational settings, and to ensure strategies proposed are a good ‘fit’ with LA workplace contexts.

Phase 3: Translation seminars

Taking inputs from phases 1 and 2 a series of short translation seminars will be held between DCC and University of Exeter staff, as well as energy managers from other southwest local authorities. Early seminars will be used to collectively interrogate prior outputs for new insights, whilst also seeking to generate new strategies for energy demand reduction. Latter seminars will explicitly seek to develop and refine a novel tool that provides challenges, ideas and critical insights to promote innovate organisational responses to a series of problems associated with demand reduction.