Loughborough University
Browse

The diffusion of domestic energy efficiency policies: a spatial perspective

Download (1.52 MB)
journal contribution
posted on 2018-01-09, 13:10 authored by Craig MortonCraig Morton, Charlie Wilson, Jillian Anable
© 2017 The Authors National domestic energy-efficiency policies are unlikely to be implemented in a geographically uniform manner. This paper demonstrates the importance of socioeconomic, contextual, and local policy conditions in shaping the spatially heterogeneous response to a national policy. Through an assessment of the geographical and temporal variation in domestic energy-efficiency assessments provided under the United Kingdom's Green Deal, the factors underpinning the spatial diffusion of this policy are identified. Spatial regression models show that the presence of young families, university educated residents, detached homes, and large households positively affects the uptake of energy-efficiency assessments whereas property market activity, personal incomes, the presence of self-employed residents, and the efficiency levels of the existing housing stock has a dampening effect. National incentives for policy implementation that are distributed through selected local authorities also work to promote the uptake of energy-efficiency assessments. Overall, the analysis clearly shows the importance of local factors in determining how national policies are implemented on the ground. This has important implications for policymakers in designing and administering national policy frameworks, in trading-off targeted implementation with fairness and uniformity, and in evaluating the local effectiveness of national policies.

Funding

The research reported in this paper was supported by the ClimateXChange centre, by the Engineering and Phyriscal Research Council Grant EPSRC EP/L024756/1 and by the European Research Council Starting Grant #678799.

History

School

  • Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering

Published in

Energy Policy

Volume

114

Pages

77 - 88

Citation

MORTON, C., WILSON, C. and ANABLE, J., 2018. The diffusion of domestic energy efficiency policies: a spatial perspective. Energy Policy, 114, pp. 77-88.

Publisher

© The Authors. Published by Elsevier

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/

Acceptance date

2017-11-26

Publication date

2017-12-22

Copyright date

2018

Notes

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Elsevier under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

ISSN

0301-4215

Language

  • en