Implications of declining household sizes and expectations of home comfort for domestic energy demand
Katherine Ellsworth-Krebs, University of St Andrews
Wednesday 6th November, 16:00 – 17:30
Venue: “The Pod” (room G.02), Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation (ECCI).
Katherine, whose research centres on sustainable consumption and theories of change, focusing on everyday life, domestic energy, and higher education institutions, will be presenting her recently accepted Nature Energy paper, the abstract of which is as follows:
“Techno-economic approaches largely avoid delineating necessary energy uses or questioning how excessive lifestyle expectations may curtail attempts to achieve ambitious climate change targets. In this presentation, I present data suggesting a general trend of increasing domestic floor area per capita globally and argue that this ought to be a key focus in future energy research considering that house size is the largest determinant of domestic energy consumption. Particular attention should be directed at the confluence of factors that influence floor area per capita and questions of lifestyle expectations, energy sufficiency, and invisible energy policies which have enabled the rise in floor area per capita both deliberately and inadvertently. Overall, this elucidates why energy research must consider lifestyle expectations and demographic trends that are generally seen as outside the remit of energy policy”.