Yes, but no: Adoption and Rejection of Energy Efficiency Innovations

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The Clean Energy Solutions Center, in partnership with Enerdata, hosted this webinar on energy efficiency barriers that firms and households face in Europe.

Backed by analyses from major institutions such as the International Energy Agency, energy efficiency is touted as a win-win-win: good for the environment, good for energy security, and profitable. However, investments in energy efficiency measures appear to be behind both socially and even privately optimal rates. For more than three decades, scholars have investigated this gap. So far, they have catalogued many factors that can explain low adoption rates but have not reached consensus about the extent to which the rates are economically suboptimal. Explanations are generally grouped in three categories: measurement and modeling errors, market failures, and behavioral (and organizational) biases. They have been distilled from multiple branches of economics, (neo)classical and behavioral economics mostly, and amalgamated in taxonomies of barriers to energy efficiency investments.

In this webinar, we (1) discussed and organized the main barriers and (2) looked at some illustrative empirical evidence of how these play out in firms and households in Europe.

The webinar presentations were followed by an interactive question-and-answer session with the audience.