PhD defence Linde Daphne Kattenberg

Keywords: Housing market, Energy transition, Sustainability, Public policy

"The Energy Transition in the Housing Market"

This dissertation examines how households make decisions about adopting clean energy technologies and how these decisions are influenced by financial incentives, information provision, peers, and regulation. It shows that energy efficiency improvements in homes can substantially reduce energy bills. However, financial motives alone do not explain why households choose to invest. Subsidy programs that were open to all households proved to be only moderately effective, as they mainly reached wealthier households that were already well positioned to adopt these technologies. Nonfinancial motives, such as contributing to the mitigation of climate change, improving home comfort, and the influence of the social environment, play an important role and can partly substitute for financial support. The findings also show that the effects of energy efficiency improvements differ greatly between households, both in realized savings and in experienced outcomes. This underscores that effective energy transition policies should take into account both household diversity and the stage of technological development, and combine financial incentives with information provision and the use of social networks.

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