Research into the impact of innovative sustainable energy experiments and demonstrations is crucial to diversifying, scaling up, and accelerating the sustainable energy transition. Although there is vast research into sustainable energy experiments and demonstrations, research literature offers a fragmented collection of findings. A coherent overview of themes and insights regarding the transformative impact of innovative sustainable energy experiments and demonstrations on sustainable energy systems from the past, present, and near future is lacking and necessary to increase experiments and demonstrations' impact on the sustainable energy transition. The research in this study fills this knowledge gap by providing such an overview and yields novel insights into the organized function and impact of experiments and demonstrations. It spans a broad spectrum of sustainable energy technologies, the empirical domains where these are invented, developed and applied, and the stakeholders involved. The overview is the outcome of a Delphi study in which the insights of 47 international scientific research experts in sustainable energy experiments and demonstrations are bundled and explained. This study presents a thematic overview of the significant insights regarding past and current sustainable energy experiments and demonstrations and outlines a research agenda for the future. Policymakers, practitioners, and scientists can leverage this to inform their sustainable energy policies, business strategies, and research programs.@en

Low-carbon energy transitions are being increasingly developed at sub-national or regional levels, forming, thus, energy regions. More energy regions have been formed as energy systems become more decentralized, and national governments devolve decision-making power to local authorities. Energy regions have been studied in several countries, but no study has yet overviewed these regions' variety, transition process, and governance approach. It is important to draw lessons for other cases worldwide, like coal and carbon-intensive regions, to understand what type of regions and how they have stimulated their energy transition. Thus, this study investigated i) the concepts of energy regions that have been published and ii) the way energy regions have transitioned in terms of governance arrangements and innovation processes. A systematic literature review was conducted covering forty-seven academic publications and three grey literature reports of energy regions in ten countries. This review covered three academic (sub-)disciplines: i.e. sustainability transitions, regional studies, and innovation studies. Results show five concepts of energy regions: city-regions, peripheralized regions, coal and carbon-intensive regions, learning regions, and renewable energy regions. The formed typology shows the possible transition pathways that regions can follow. Interestingly, only those energy regions that adopted social innovations had the potential to empower their region, its organizations, and its citizens. Finally, recommendations for practitioners in similar regions worldwide are outlined to help overcome obstacles and advance their low-carbon transition.@en

CO₂ emissions need to be reduced drastically to fight climate change and minimise the further increase of average global temperatures. The decarbonisation of the energy system aims at reducing CO₂ emissions and is thus urgently needed. This transition is facilitated by inter alia switching to renewable energy sources and more efficient technologies. In the past, the energy transition has mostly focused on supply-side measures. However, at least since the publication of the 6th IPCC assessment report, demand-side measures have gained attention. Thereby, the roles individuals play in achieving this transition is recognised as important. This Special Feature is dedicated to exploring the roles of individuals within the energy transition. The nine thematically featured articles provide insights on this topic using different foci and angles, such as the information to guide individuals' behaviour, the influence of media in framing roles, and technology acceptance. To contextualise and synthesise these diverse contributions, this editorial introduction outlines three different, complementary clusters of roles: technology adoption, lifestyle choices, and political action. By theorising users as participants in transitions through diverse practices, we widen the basis for future research to address and incorporate the roles users play in engaging with and shaping these transitions.

@en

The installation of solar panels by residential households is vital for the energy transition. However, the rapid uptake of solar panels by households leads to congestion in the electricity grid. Specifically, when the sun shines, these solar panels simultaneously produce a lot of electricity that is fed into the grid, which is inefficient and can destabilize the grid. Consequently, it is better if self-produced solar energy is directly consumed when the sun is shining. Loadshifting involves shifting energy use (e.g., doing laundry) to periods in which energy is produced. This necessitates behavior change within the household, and it is not yet well understood why people struggle to loadshift. To assess the individualistic and contextual factors influencing laundry loadshifting behavior in the Netherlands, we conducted a survey among 283 Dutch households with solar panels. The survey builds on a framework that integrates aspects of the theory of planned behavior and social practice theory. The framework comprises eight factors (sufficiency attitude, user beliefs, know-how, monitoring skills, habits, hassle, practical knowledge provided, and feedback provision by system design), which are quantitatively measured and analyzed. We used multiple regression analysis to explore the collected responses. Results show the relevance of monitoring skills, strong habits, passive user beliefs and practical knowledge for laundry loadshifting behavior. Findings highlight that instead of asking people to adjust to technologies, technologies should support behavior change and understand its intricacies and connections to its broader context. Additionally, it is important to strengthen households' beliefs regarding their active role in the energy system.@en

Residential public charging points are shared by multiple electric vehicle drivers, often neighbours. Therefore, charging behaviour is embedded in a social context. Behaviours that affect, or are influenced by, other public charging point users have been sparsely studied and lack an overarching and comprehensive definition. Consequently, very few measures are applied in practice to influence charging behaviour. We aim to classify and define the social dimension of charging behaviour from a social-psychological perspective and, using a behaviour change framework, identify and analyse the measures to influence this behaviour. We interviewed 15 experts on residential public charging infrastructure in the Netherlands. We identified 17 charging behaviours rooted in interpersonal interactions between individuals and interactions between individuals and technology. These behaviours can be categorised into prosocial and antisocial charging behaviours. Prosocial charging behaviour provides or enhances the opportunity for other users to charge their vehicle at the public charging point, for instance by charging only when necessary. Antisocial charging behaviour prevents or diminishes this opportunity, for instance by occupying the charging point after charging, intentionally or unintentionally. We then identified 23 measures to influence antisocial and prosocial charging behaviours. These measures can influence behaviour through human–technology interaction, such as providing charging etiquettes to new electric vehicle drivers or charging idle fees, and interpersonal interaction, such as social pressure from other charging point users or facilitating social interactions to exchange requests. Our approach advocates for more attention to the social dimension of charging behaviour.@en

Airborne wind energy (AWE) is an emerging renewable energy technology that uses kites to harvest winds at higher altitudes than wind turbines. Understanding how residents experience a local AWE system (AWES) is important as the technology approaches commercialization. Such knowledge can help adjust the design and deployment of an AWES to fit locals' needs better, thereby decreasing the technology's burden on people. Although the AWE literature claims that the technology affects nature and residents less than wind turbines, empirical evidence has been lacking. This first community acceptance study recruited residents within a 3.5 km radius of an AWE test site in Northern Germany. Using structured questionnaires, 54 residents rated the AWES and the closest wind farm on visual, sound, safety, siting, environmental, and ecological aspects. Contrary to the literature's claims, residents assessed the noise, ecological, and safety impacts similarly for the AWES and the wind farm. Only visual impacts were rated better for the AWES (e.g., no shadows were perceived). Consistent with research on wind turbines, residents who rated the site operation as fairer and the developer as more transparent tended to have more positive attitudes towards the AWES and to experience less noise annoyance. Consequently, recommendations for the AWE industry and policymakers include mitigating technology impacts and implementing evidence-based strategies to ensure just and effective project development. The findings are limited to one specific AWES using soft-wing kites. Future research should assess community responses across regions and different types of AWESs to test the findings' generalizability.@en

Automated vehicles (AVs) may transform not only our travel experience but our complete daily schedules. This study analyses the data from an interactive stated activity-travel survey using latent class cluster analysis to uncover the types and prevalence of schedule changes with AVs. The analysis reveals that the majority of respondents expected little to no changes in their schedules. Importantly however, these responses are correlated with low commitment to the survey, evident in unrealistically short response times to non-central survey parts and simpler representations of their current schedules. The remaining responses reveal significant and varied changes in activities on board and outside travel, and in commute departure times. We conclude that the prevalence of schedule changes may be underestimated in our and possibly other AV studies due to low survey commitment. Our findings also highlight diverse potential motivations behind schedule changes with AVs: while some travellers may desire to free up time for other activities during the day (time saving), others may satisfy an unmet activity need by engaging in on-board activities (time spending). Considering this heterogeneity is crucial in endeavours to quantify the total benefits and costs that automated vehicles will bring to their users.@en

The complex and uncertain environment of the humanitarian response to crises can lead to data bias, which can affect decision-making. Evidence of data bias in crisis information management (CIM) remains scattered despite its potentially significant impact on crisis response. To understand what biases emerge in complex crises and how they affect CIM, we conducted a combined interview and document analysis study. Focusing on the largest humanitarian crisis in the world, i.e., the conflict in Yemen, we conducted 25 interviews with managers and analysts of response organizations, and assessed 47 reports and datasets created by response organizations in Yemen. We find evidence of a cycle of bias reinforcement through which bias cascades between field, headquarters and donor levels of crisis response. Researchers, as well as practitioners, need to consider these underlying biases and reinforcement loops because they influence what data can be collected when, by whom, from whom, and how the data is shared and used. To the CIM literature, we contribute an in-depth understanding of how four types of data bias emerge in crises: political, accessibility, topical, and sampling bias.@en

Public and private organisations have several instruments at hand to reduce consumer demand for energy. These instruments can take the form of information campaigns, various subsidy programs, or regulations to encourage consumers to adopt greener technology, develop energy-efficient habits or travel more sustainably. However, the well-intended programs often stumble over people’s unwillingness to change, lack of interest, or limited attention. As part of this workshop, we will introduce an online toolkit developed by the Users TCP Behavioural Insights Platform that helps policymakers consider psychological factors that might affect the success of their policy. In the workshop, participants will learn how use the tool to make energy programs and policies more behaviourally informed and ultimately more likely to succeed.@en

Climate change is one of the biggest global challenges the earth faces. It comes with a need to change the way we produce, supply, distribute and use energy. For this energy transition, we not only need money and technology, we also need a change in behaviour on multiple levels. Psychological perspectives, theories, and research methods are essential to discover behavioural patterns among different stakeholders, varying from end-users, producers, policymakers and installers. This article describes the role of psychology in behavioural research on the energy transition. Furthermore, it describes how research findings are applied in energy policy and technology.@en

In democratic societies, governments cannot act in isolation from public opinion. This is especially true regarding terrorism, where public perception is the instrument targeted by terrorists to achieve their political goals. Nevertheless, governments must also be able to resist public pressure and preserve individual rights. All this suggests that researching public perception of terrorist attacks is crucial. We make an important contribution in this direction by measuring the importance the public assigns to various attributes of terrorist attacks. Using novel methodology (conjoint experiment) and survey data from the UK and The Netherlands (N = 6,315), we find that people are concerned with attacks by immigrants (in the Netherlands), and by individuals acting as part of a terror cell, and with jihadist motivation. Furthermore, past experience with specific terrorist tactics drive preference to address such attacks more than others. In both countries people strongly focus on the severity of attacks, and under-weigh probabilities. The terror attack in the Netherlands in 2019 provided an opportunity to examine perception right after an actual attack. Also there we have found that people’s concerns are driven by experience with specific attacks. A better understanding of terrorism perception can inform policymakers about the gap between optimal strategies to combat terrorism and the expectations of the public.@en

In the built environment sector, enhancing energy efficiency through energy retrofitting is a key strategy to mitigate climate change. Despite the efforts made by local municipalities to offer technical and financial support, the rate of home energy retrofit remains low. The decision to undertake home energy retrofit is complex for homeowners. It involves high upfront financial and nonfinancial costs, as well as various benefits over the long term. Substantial costs and ambiguous benefits may prevent homeowners from investing in retrofit measures. Moreover, existing research and policy interventions have rarely accounted for the nonfinancial costs of energy retrofitting. Therefore, this study aims to understand homeowners’ evaluation of nonfinancial transaction costs against financial upfront investment costs. To this end, we design a discrete choice experiment, in which recruited homeowners are presented with a series of decision-making scenarios where they must choose their preferred investment option from two alternatives, alongside the option to maintain the current status quo (no investment). For each retrofit package, we provide information on five attributes: upfront investment cost, time investment, disruption during implementation, energy bill savings, and energy independence. Furthermore, we investigate whether scalable behavioural interventions can be designed to boost homeowners' longtermoriented thinking, thereby increasing their tolerance to short-term costs. A treatment is designed to emphasise long-term financial and nonfinancial benefits of energy retrofitting. We expect that boosting long-term thinking will reduce the negative effects of upfront investment cost, time investment, and disruption on individual utilities, thus increasing homeowners’ preferences for energy retrofit investments.@en

A crisis requires the affected population, governments or non-profit organizations, as well as crisis experts, to make urgent and sometimes life-critical decisions. With the urgency and uncertainty they create, crises are particularly amenable to inducing cognitive biases that influence decisionmaking. However, there is limited empirical evidence regarding the impact of cognitive biases on estimation, judgment, and decision-making tasks in crises. Possible biases occurring in crises are: (1) to be influenced by how information is framed (i.e., framing effect), (2) to overly rely on information that confirms rather than opposes preliminary assumptions (i.e., confirmation bias), (3) to rely heavily on a skewed informational cue when making estimations (i.e., anchoring bias), and (4) to see the own decision-making as less biased than decision-making of others (i.e., bias blind spot). We investigate these four cognitive biases using three online survey experiments targeting crisis-affected people of the general public (n = 460, mTurk workers), governmental and non-profit workers (n = 50, mTurk workers), and crisis experts (n = 21, purposefully sampled). Our findings show that crisis experts are the least biased group but are still significantly affected by anchoring, framing, and bias blind spot. Crisis-affected people from the general public showed the strongest susceptibility to all four biases studied. The findings have implications for future research on crisis information systems (IS) design. As crisis response is increasingly facilitated through IS, we propose debiasing functions that account for biased user behavior in crises. @en

Climate change is one of the biggest challenges of this century. To contain its effects, the way we act would have to change significantly. Especially in the building sector, much progress can be made. Attempts have been made to stimulate sustainable behavior in the industry, for example, by implementing sustainable building measures in construction designs. However, adoption rates of these measures are low and behavioral change among building professionals is needed. Knowing why building professionals hold back in their use of these measures could support this behavioral change. This knowledge could, for example, inform energy policies or organizational strategies. That is why this study utilized the technology acceptance model and presents psychological factors as barriers to innovative sustainable building measure adoption in an organizational context. A survey among building professionals involved in real estate development (n = 109) was used to explore how conservatism within the building industry hinders adopting the building measures. To represent conservatism, we selected two cognitive biases that can be interpreted as a manifestation of status quo bias and confirmation bias, both fueled by information hassle (a micro-stressor caused by complex information). The effects of these variables on the adoption of sustainable building measures were tested using structural equation modeling, a methodology suitable for testing complex models and commonly used in behavioral research. Survey data indicate that conservatism is an essential barrier for building professionals to adopt sustainable building measures and that it increases when knowledge is low and information is complex. Based on these findings, we argue that policies and organizational strategies that attack these psychological barriers could promote the adoption of innovative sustainable building measures within the building sector.@en

Retrofitting residential buildings can help mitigate the effects of climate change. Cognitive biases are systematic deviations from rationality in decision making and can lead to inaction, delay, and uncertain decisions. Understanding the cognitive biases involved in residential renovation decisions and developing interventions to overcome them can help increase residential renovation rates. Despite their importance, few studies have examined the impact of cognitive biases on energy retrofits. The question addressed in this study is: “Can accounting for cognitive biases improve the prediction of homeowners’ actual investment decisions, and how can the outcomes be used to recommend potential behavioural interventions?”. Expected Utility Theory (EUT) and Cumulative Prospect Theory (CPT) are compared to evaluate which model(s) more accurately describes actual decision-making behaviour regarding energy retrofits. The EUT assumes a rational decision maker. The CPT is a quantitative model that assumes a decision-maker operating under risk and uncertainty and subject to the cognitive biases of reference dependence, loss aversion, decreasing sensitivity, and probability weighting. The influences of cognitive biases on energy retrofit decisions can be quantified if the relative performance of CPT versus EUT is more accurate. The data for these analyses come from housing surveys conducted in the Netherlands in 2012 and 2018, which also collected data on energy modules. 2,784 and 2,878 homeowners were surveyed, respectively. The model is validated by estimating the coefficients of EUT and CPT and identifying the similarities and differences between the results of the two datasets. Before estimating the parameters, four household clusters are identified using grey relational analysis and the K-Means cluster. For the first time, the EUT and CPT parameters are estimated for four clusters and two energy retrofits, double glazing and insulation, using a genetic algorithm because the equations are nonlinear. The results confirm that CPT provides a better description of the actual decision behaviour than EUT using the two previously established initial values of Layard et al. (2008) and Häckel et al. (2017) as well as the parameters estimated by the genetic algorithm. In the latter case, CPT correctly predicts the decisions of 86% of homeowners to renovate their homes to be energy efficient or not. EUT, on the other hand, overestimates the number of decisions to renovate: it incorrectly predicts retrofit for 52% of homeowners who did not renovate for energy efficiency reasons. Using the estimated parameters of CPT, the cognitive biases of reference dependence, loss aversion, diminishing sensitivity, and probability weighting can be clearly seen for different target groups. The groups with the highest average incomes and house values had the highest loss risk aversion parameters. These households invested more in installing insulation and double glazing.

@en

The building sector can contribute considerably to reducing global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In the Netherlands, the GHG emissions must be mitigated by 95% by 2050 relative to the 1990 baseline. Various factors, such as low renovation rates cause uncertainties in reaching these targets. The current study aims for investigating the barriers and opportunities regarding the energy efficiency renovations (EER) and programs offered by the cities in the Netherlands. Homeowners encounter individually and collectively different forms of barriers during their journeys of EERs. By collective decision-making, we mean when an individual homeowner cannot make the final decision on EER by themselves. Homeowners may have to decide together with other homeowners or even tenants in case of living in a multi-family dwelling. The local authorities sometimes offer the energy efficiency programs at neighbourhood levels and the agreement of most households is essential for the continuation of the energy efficiency programs. The literature review, semi-structured interviews and focus groups are conducted with experts from the largest cities in the Netherlands. The focus groups and interviews are used to examine the barriers and opportunities especially at neighbourhood and street levels. Our main initial findings include the barriers of (a) Individual homeowners: difficulties in making them interested to conduct EER, lack of knowledge for the starting point of renovation, additional barriers of following many steps in conducting EERs for the old dwellings; (b) Homeowner associations: difficulties in reaching agreement by 70% of homeowners, timeconsuming process for agreement, and not well-organised meetings by all the homeowners' associations; (c) Neighbourhood level: cultural diversities, difficulties in finding solutions for different groups of people, etc.@en