Conceptualizing energy services: A review of energy and well-being along the Energy Service Cascade

By G. Kalt, Dominik Wiedenhofer, Christoph Görg, H. Haberl. Energy Research & Social Science, 2019

145 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The concept of energy services is used in different contexts and scientific fields mainly to emphasize that it is the services provided by energy rather than energy carriers that people demand and that generate well-being. While the value of the concept is widely acknowledged, there are remarkable differences in how energy services are conceptualized. This article proposes the ‘Energy Service Cascade’ (ESC) as a conceptual framework aimed at clarifying and bridging different approaches. The ESC is inspired by Haines-Young’s and Potschin’s (2011) ‘Ecosystem Service Cascade’, which distinguishes: a) structures, b) functions, c) services, d) benefits and e) values. When used to systematize the debates around energy services, we argue that these differentiations reflect a) energy conversion chains comprising natural structures, human-made capital and labor; b) physical functions performed by energy chains; c) services humans demand to foster well-being; d) the actual contributions to human well-being (health, life satisfaction, …); e) individual preferences and attitudes that create willingness to pay, encourage business models, etc. ‘Values’ influence how services and benefits are perceived and affect ‘structures’ through various mechanisms (investment decisions, environmental and economic policy, …). To showcase the usefulness of the ESC as conceptual framework, we provide a review of literature to reveal the differing scopes of four main contexts in which energy services are being studied. We call them ‘energy chain context’, ‘energy demand context’, ‘well-being context’ and ‘entrepreneurial context’. Given the diversity of how energy services are interpreted and the various scopes and research aims, a full harmonization of concepts seems out of reach. Nevertheless, a more unified understanding of what is considered as ‘service’ and differentiation from ‘functions’ and ‘benefits’, as provided by the ESC, could be a first step towards more systematic terminology and may support interaction between the different discourses.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Pollution, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a2b8c75a31cd232ff855ebf0233c34ddc9b513de

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Citations in the corpus

Providing decent living with minimum energy: A global scenario (2020, background): “However, a discussion of final and primary energy leads to another important point, namely, that final energy is still a means to an end – one stage in the energy cascade (Kalt et al., 2019).”
A systematic review of the evidence on decoupling of GDP, resource use and GHG emissions, part II: synthesizing the insights (2020, background): “…summarize the findings on the extent of decoupling between GDP and final energy as well as exergy (section 3.2), i.e. indicators that are much more closely linked to the actual functions, utility and services of energy for socioeconomic activities (Lovins 1979, Haas et al 2008, Kalt et al 2019).”