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From a technical and economic perspective, many assessments have highlighted the presence of cost-effective opportunities to reduce energy use in buildings. However several bodies note the significance of multiple barriers that prevent the take-up of energy efficiency measures in buildings. These include lack of awareness and concern, limited access to reliable information from trusted sources, fears about risk, disruption and other 'transaction costs', concerns about up-front costs and inadeuqate
Access to suitably priced finance, a lack of confidence in suppliers and technologies and the presence of split incentives between landlords and tenants. The widespread presence of these barriers led experts to predict that without a concerned push from policy, two-thirds of the economically viable potential to improve energy efficiency will remain unexploited by 2035. These barriers are albatross around the neck that represent a classic market failure and a basis for governmental intervention.
While these measurements focus on the technical, financial or economic barriers preventing the take-up of energy efficiency options in buildings, others emphasize the significance of the often deeply embedded social practices that shape energy use in buildings. These analyses focus not on the preferences and rationalities that might shape individual behaviours, but on the ‘entangled’ cultural practices, norms, values and routines that underpin domestic energy use. Focusing on the practice-related aspects of consumption generates very different conceptual framings and policy prescriptions than those that emerge from more traditional or mainstream perspectives. But the underlying case for government intervention to help to promote retrofit and the diffusion of more energy efficient particles is still apparent, even though the forms of intervention advocated are often very different to those that emerge from a more technical or economic perspective.
Based on the recognition of the multiple barriers to change and the social, economic and environmental benefits that could be realized if they were overcome, government support for retrofit (renovating existing infrastructure to make it more energy efficient) has been widespread. Retrofit programmes have been supported and adopted in diverse forms in many settings and their ability to recruit householders and then to impact their energy use has been discussed quite extensively. Frequently, these discussions have criticized the extent to which retrofit schemes rely on incentives and the provision of new technologies to change behaviour and the provision of new technologies to change behaviour whilst ignoring the many other factors that might limit either participation in the schemes or their impact on the behaviours and practices that shape domestic energy use. These factors are obviously central to the success of retrofit schemes, but evaluations of different schemes have found that despite these they can still have significant impacts.
Few experts that the best estimate of the gap between the technical potential and the actual insitu performance of energy efficiency measures is 50 % , with 35% coming from performance gaps and 15% coming from ‘comfort taking’ or direct rebound effects. They further suggest that the direct rebound effect of energy efficiency measures related to household heating is likely to be less than 30% while rebound effects for various domestic energy efficiency lead to increased demand for other goods and services). Other analyses also note that the gap between technical, potential and actual performance is likely to vary by measure, with the range extending from 0% for measures such as solar water heating to 50% for measures such as improved heating controls. And others note that levels of comfort taking are likely to vary according to the levels of comfort taking are likely to vary according to the levels of consumption and fuel poverty in the sample of homes where insulation is installed, with the range extending from 30% when considering homes across all income groups to around 60% when considering only lower income homes. The scale of these gaps is significant because it materially affects the impacts of retrofit schemes and expectations and perceptions of these impacts go on to influence levels of political, financial and public support for these schemes.
The literature on retrofit highlights the presence of multiple barriers to change and the need for government support, if these are to be overcome. Although much has been written on the extent to which different forms of support enable the wider take-up of domestic energy efficiency measures, behaviours and practices, various areas of contestation remain and there is still an absence of robust ex-post evidence on the extent to which these schemes actually do lead to the social, economic and environmental benefits that are widely claimed.