Empirical estimates of the direct rebound effect: A review

By S. Sorrell, John Dimitropoulos, Matthew Sommerville. 2009

1,029 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Improvements in energy efficiency make energy services cheaper, and therefore encourage increased consumption of those services. This so-called direct rebound effect offsets the energy savings that may otherwise be achieved. This paper provides an overview of the theoretical and methodological issues relevant to estimating the direct rebound effect and summarises the empirical estimates that are currently available. The paper focuses entirely on household energy services, since this is where most of the evidence lies and points to a number of potential sources of bias that may lead the effect to be overestimated. For household energy services in the OECD, the paper concludes that the direct rebound effect should generally be less than 30%.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6c642e81817bbd422a6153bb26c8d35366622871

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In Environmental Engineering

In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

Citations in the corpus

“Rebound” Effects from Increased Energy Efficiency: A Time to Pause and Reflect (2013, background): “…e.g. most recently Wang et al., 2012), Energy Efﬁciency (7 articles, e.g. Na¨sse´n and Holmberg, 2009), The Energy Journal (2 articles—Frondel et al., 2008, and Small and Van Dender) and Energy Policy (40 articles, most recently published Li and Zhang, 2012, and most cited Sorrell et al. 2009).”
The economy-wide rebound effect from improved energy efficiency in Swedish industries–A general equilibrium analysis (2015, background): “There exist a number of papers that explicitly discuss the rebound effect in general and overviews the existing literature (Greening et al., 2000; Berkhout et al., 2000; Binswanger, 2001; Sorrell, 2007; Sorrell and Dimitropoulos, 2008; Sorrell et al., 2009; Herring and Sorrell, 2009; Madlener and Al”
Rebound Effects in German Residential Heating: Do Ownership and Income Matter? (2011, background): “7 However, apart from these price effects we also have to consider other influencing factors (Sorrell et al., 2009: 1357).”
CLEAN FUEL SAVING TECHNOLOGY ADOPTION IN URBAN ETHIOPIA (2013, neutral): “[38] Sorrell, S.”
Missing carbon reductions? Exploring rebound and backfire effects in UK households (2010, background): “Knowledge Collaboration & Learning for Sustainable Innovation ERSCP-EMSU conference, Delft, The Netherlands, October 25-29, 20103 3 was first studied by Khazzoom (1980) and has since been the focus of much research (Greening et al. 2000; Sorrell and Dimitropoulos 2007a; Sorrell and Dimitropoulos 200”
Scenario Analysis (2010, neutral): “Meanwhile, there is a growing body of literature on the extent of direct rebound effects (e.g., Sorrell et al. 2009) that could be used to improve the approach.”
Recycling Gone Bad: When the Option to Recycle Increases Resource Consumption (2013, background): “First, our work contributes to the (typically cost-focused) literature on rebound effects (e.g., Small & Van Dender, 2007; Sorrell et al., 2009) by showing that non-cost (potentially affective) factors can also lead to increased consumption.”