Energy Seminar: Week 8: Homeowner motivation, knowledge and involvement in domestic energy retrofit
VENUE CHANGED FROM OMS to OUCE, Atmosphere Room. Yekatherina Bobrova will talk in person in the Atmposhere Room, Oxford University Centre for the Environment. This is a hybrid event presented through TEAMS webinar online. Sink up for link.
Retrofit of domestic buildings will be crucial to deliver more affordable heating and meet climate goals. In recent Oxford Energy Network seminars, various speakers have explored skills, challenges in the supply chain and financing mechanisms. In this seminar, I will focus more on the people living in their homes – their motivations, knowledge, involvement, and how these shape their retrofit journeys.

Building research and policy typically consider the rational reasoning behind homeowner domestic energy retrofit decisions, such as health and well-being considerations, climate concerns and altruistic behaviours, and financial considerations, i.e. returns on investment and savings on energy bills. However, the focus only on rational reasoning neglects the emotional aspects of homeowner decisions regarding their dwellings. As home is a place imbued with significant meaning for individuals, emotional aspects can play important role in their retrofit decisions. I will explore this emotional realm and suggest how rational reasoning can be complemented with an emotional one.

I will then focus on homeowner retrofit decision processes, suggesting different mechanisms to help transform initial intentions into ambitious (hopefully) retrofit solutions, and subsequently reduce energy use post retrofit. Research and policy traditionally focus on the identification of retrofit drivers and barriers, to strengthen the former and reduce the later. However, retrofit should be understood as a dynamic process that unfolds over a lengthy period of time, whereas drivers/ barriers approach does not allow to capture temporary dynamics during the retrofit process. The process perspective makes a temporal dimension explicit, forcing to think about mechanisms that help to move through the stages of the process, as well as about possible policy leavers necessary to facilitate the transition at each stage of the process.
Date: 14 June 2022, 17:00 (Tuesday, 8th week, Trinity 2022)
Venue: Dyson Perrins Building, off South Parks Road OX1 3QY
Venue Details: OUCE, Atmosphere Room, Dyson Perrins Lab, South Parks Road, OX1 3PY
Speaker: Yekatherina Bobrova (ECI, Oxford)
Organising department: Environmental Change Institute
Organiser: Anne L Ryan (ECI, University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address: info@energy.ox.ac.uk
Host: Robin Morris (Oxford Energy Convenor)
Part of: Oxford Energy Seminars 2021-2022
Booking required?: Recommended
Booking url: https://bit.ly/3GEvA0n
Audience: Public
Editor: Anne Ryan