Earth Notes: General Bibliography (penasco2023assessing)

• [penasco2023assessing] Cristina Peñasco and Laura Díaz Anadón Assessing the effectiveness of energy efficiency measures in the residential sector gas consumption through dynamic treatment effects: Evidence from England and Wales (accessed 2023-01-06), 2023, Energy Economics, volume 117, ISSN 0140-9883, doi:10.1016/j.eneco.2022.106435, article/pages 106435 (article) (BibTeX).
  keywords

  Energy efficiency, Residential energy consumption, Gas consumption, Heating, Staggered diff-in-diff, Energy policy
  abstract

  Improving energy efficiency (EE) is vital to ensure a sustainable, affordable, and secure energy system. The residential sector represents, on average, 18.6% of the total final energy consumption in the OECD countries in 2018, reaching 29.5% in the UK (IEA, 2020a). Using a staggered differences-in-differences approach with dynamic treatment effects, we analyse changes in residential gas consumption five years before and after the adoption of energy efficiency measures. The analysis includes energy efficiency interventions involving the installation of new heating-related insulation equipment—i.e., of loft insulation and cavity walls, supported by energy efficiency programmes in England and Wales between 2005 and 2017—using a panel of 55,154 households from the National Energy Efficiency Data-Framework (NEED). We control for, among other factors, energy prices and the extent to which gas consumption changes are dependent on household characteristics and variations in weather conditions. Our results indicate that the adoption of EE measures is associated with significant reductions in household residential gas consumption one year after their implementation. However, the effect does not last in the long run and energy savings disappear four years after the retrofitting of cavity wall insulation measures and after two years following the installation of loft insulation. The disappearance of energy savings in the longer run could be explained by the energy performance gap, the rebound effect and/or by concurrent residential construction projects and renovations associated with increases in energy consumption. Notably, for households in deprived areas, the installation of these efficiency measures does not deliver energy savings. These results confirm the existence of effects that reduce the energy savings from the adoption of these efficiency technologies over time and indicates that, for some groups, these net savings do not seem to materialize.
  note

  [Lack of persistence of savings from even purely-technical, eg insulation, efficiency improvements. Based on National Energy Efficiency Data-Framework (NEED): 717,002 observations corresponding to than 55,154 households from 2005 to 2017. Quote: "Recent estimates suggest that 12 million dwellings will need to be retrofitted with energy efficiency technical improvements like insulation in the next 30 years," and "Recent synthetic academic work notes that there is little evidence (in the UK or beyond) on the impact of policies for the installation of residential efficiency measures on heating use in buildings," and "there seems to be a need for additional behavioural changes to realize the full saving potential of the adoption of EE improvements," and "...the introduction of EE technical improvements seems to procure a more stable pattern in gas consumption in the years following implementation."]