Analysing the house-owners’ perceptions on benefits and barriers of energy renovation in Swedish single-family houses

• Single-family houses offer a large potential for energy savings by energy renovation (ER). Homeowners’ motivation to implement ER derives from the benefits and barriers they perceive. Benefits are the positive consequences that can motivate homeowners to act and barriers are the challenges that demotivate them to undertake ER. Different benefits and barriers do not homogenously affect every homeowner. Identifying motivating benefits and demotivating barriers for each specific group among homeowners can shed lights on ER decision-making and enable policies that are more effective. The objective of this study is to contextualize the implementation of ER by understanding how the perceived benefits and barriers influence homeowners. This study links the expected consequences, which are benefits and barriers to the influential factors on ER, which are used to group the homeowners.The analysis is based on a questionnaire survey mailed to 1550 owners of single-family houses in northern Sweden. The perceptions of homeowners on benefits and barriers of ER are significantly different between the groups that are motivated and unmotivated to implement ER. Despite the perceived importance of some of the benefits such as energy cost reduction, they may not be determinative for the homeowners’ decision to undertake ER. The homeowners are more likely to implement ER for reasons other than energy use reduction such as for improving the indoor environment. The barriers such as the difficulty of finding a low-interest loan and reliable information sources are found to impede the intention to implement ER among different groups. Policy implications to facilitate ER in single-family houses are discussed.

Subject headings

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Naturresursteknik -- Energisystem (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Environmental Engineering -- Energy Systems (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Energy efficient renovation

Investment decision

Perceptions

Implementation

House-owners

Sweden

environmental science

miljövetenskap

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)