Reducing energy demand: A review of issues, challenges and approaches

By S. Sorrell. 2015

778 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Most commentators expect improved energy efficiency and reduced energy demand to provide the dominant contribution to tackling global climate change. But at the global level, the correlation between increased wealth and increased energy consumption is very strong and the impact of policies to reduce energy demand is both limited and contested. Different academic disciplines approach energy demand reduction in different ways: emphasising some mechanisms and neglecting others, being more or less optimistic about the potential for reducing energy demand and providing insights that are more or less useful for policymakers. This article provides an overview of the main issues and challenges associated with energy demand reduction, summarises how this challenge is ‘framed’ by key academic disciplines, indicates how these can provide complementary insights for policymakers and argues that a ‘sociotechnical’ perspective can provide a deeper understanding of the nature of this challenge and the processes through which it can be achieved. The article integrates ideas from the natural sciences, economics, psychology, innovation studies and sociology but does not give equal weight to each. It argues that reducing energy demand will prove more difficult than is commonly assumed and current approaches will be insufficient to deliver the transformation required.

Subfields: Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2ba5ef402de8e64282f0c4d94c063506e28ac399

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

1. Umer Shahzad
2. J. Barrett
3. K. Scott
4. P. Bögel
5. A. Gouldson
6. Elizabeth Shove
7. Hussam Jouhara
8. Marco Sakai

Citations in the corpus

• Municipal solid waste management and waste-to-energy in the context of a circular economy and energy recycling in Europe (2017, background): “From an economic point of view, new technologies typically face an uphill struggle when first introduced due to a lack of economies of scale and learning economies, not yet established supply chains and market structures [4].”
• Does Export product diversification help to reduce energy demand: Exploring the contextual evidences from the newly industrialized countries (2021, background): “Sorrell (2015) provided an overview regarding the issues and challenges of reducing global energy demand.”
• Review and classification of barriers and enablers of demand response in the smart grid (2017, background): “Though it should be highlighted that the complexity of the relevant systems means that such classes are interrelated [25].”
• Consumption‐based carbon accounting: does it have a future? (2017, background): “A note of caution is due here though, as such emissions effectiveness of efficiency measures can be diminished by rebound effects.(106) As Sorrell(106) points out, these are extremely difficult to calculate, but the best available evidence suggests that they are higher than previously thought and ca”
• The need for comprehensive and well targeted instrument mixes to stimulate energy transitions: The case of energy efficiency policy (2017, neutral): “…it has long been established that even cost-effective energy efficiency measures are often not taken up by consumers or businesses (the so-called ‘energy efficiency gap’), and that therefore policy is needed to support their delivery (Chai and Yeo 2012; Jaffe and Stavins 1994; Sorrell 2015).”
• What is wrong with energy efficiency? (2018, background): “…p. 10)6 Instead, there are concerted efforts to establish the extent to which forms of rebound, take back or backfire undercut anticipated benefits (Sorrell, 2015), and to accommodate the fact that that efficiency savings relating to one activity or technology can be spent in other entirely…”
• Role of psychology in sociotechnical transitions studies: Review in relation to consumption and technology acceptance (2018, methodology): “Articles that explicitly use psychological theories to discuss the use of different disciplinary theoretical approaches in more general terms (e.g. Batel et al., 2016; Sorrell, 2015) are of particular interest in this regard.”