Determining the factors of household energy transitions: A multi-domain study

Journal article, 2019

Energy transitions at the household level are important because there are so many households, and motives and barriers to these transitions processes are not well understood. The objective of this paper is to investigate explanatory variables of household energy transitions. We select papers investigating explanatory variables underpinning household energy transitions in three domains: adoption of solar photovoltaics (PV) in households, adoption/transition to sustainable residential heating systems (RHS) and adoption/transition to alternative fuel vehicles (AFVs). In all three domains the chosen literature employ a wide variety of quantitative analyses such as discrete choice models ranging from multinomial logit models and principal component analysis to qualitative assessment of the answers through inductive analysis. The explanatory variables are categorized in six superordinate explanatory variable categories of economic factors, environmental factors, personal preferences and values, social factors, household characteristics and market and policy factors. In total we identify 31 explanatory variables which have been investigated in the 38 articles chosen, falling under the six categories. Investment cost is an important explanatory variable for all three domains, but a policy variable such as government subsidy could mitigate the former explanatory variable. We propose a conceptual framework as an initial step towards understanding the interactions and impacts of the explanatory variables with each other.