University of Oulu

Immonen A, Kopsakangas-Savolainen M. Capturing Consumers’ Awareness and the Intention to Support Carbon Neutrality through Energy Efficient Consumption. Energies. 2022; 15(11):4022. https://doi.org/10.3390/en15114022

Capturing consumers’ awareness and the intention to support carbon neutrality through energy efficient consumption

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Author: Immonen, Anne1; Kopsakangas-Savolainen, Maria2,3
Organizations: 1VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, P.O. Box 1100, FIN-90571 Oulu, Finland
2Oulu Business School, University of Oulu, P.O. Box 8000, FIN-90014 Oulu, Finland
3Finnish Environment Institute, P.O. Box 413, FIN-90014 Oulu, Finland
Format: article
Version: published version
Access: open
Online Access: PDF Full Text (PDF, 4 MB)
Persistent link: http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi-fe2022071351655
Language: English
Published: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 2022
Publish Date: 2022-07-13
Description:

Abstract

The EU has several directives aiming toward carbon neutrality and is attempting to promote and encourage individual electricity consumers to participate in this endeavor. The key idea behind consumer awakening and activation is to push consumers to become aware of their electricity consumption behavior. The purpose of this paper was to examine the current consumption behavior of Finnish electricity consumers and their intention to support the goals of carbon neutrality through energy efficient consumption. The aim was to reveal how far the consumption behavior of people was from the intention to tackle climate change. To reach this goal, a qualitative research method was applied to evaluate the consumer awareness and intentions. A consumer survey was conducted to enable standardized and consistent data collection. The research utilized a key performance indicator (KPI) approach to evaluate the results: the social KPIs connected with qualitative values provide a comprehensive approach. According to the results, the awareness of consumers of their consumption behavior was not very high, and some data needs can be identified. In addition, clear intentions can be detected among the residents to support the environment and to save energy. However, the consumers did not seem to be aware of the available data and existing services that could help them to improve their energy efficiency. Therefore, more motivation and communication is still required to affect the electricity consumption behavior.

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Series: Energies
ISSN: 1996-1073
ISSN-E: 1996-1073
ISSN-L: 1996-1073
Volume: 15
Issue: 11
Article number: 4022
DOI: 10.3390/en15114022
OADOI: https://oadoi.org/10.3390/en15114022
Type of Publication: A1 Journal article – refereed
Field of Science: 512 Business and management
Subjects:
Funding: This research was supported by the MAKING CITY project, which receives funding from the European H2020 Research and Innovation program under grant agreement no. 824418.
EU Grant Number: (824418) MAKING-CITY - Energy efficient pathway for the city transformation: enabling a positive future
Copyright information: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/