Abstract
Previous research often regard household and individual as synonymous actors, although the overall household electricity consumption is the aggregate of diverging actions by individual household members. We disentangle the impact of actor-specific predictors on household and individual electricity consumption, employing regression models to data of 204 Austrian multi-person households. Predictors add more to the explained variance of household and individual electricity consumption if they are located at the same actor level as the dependent variable. While household electricity consumption is best predicted by the household context and value/knowledge factors, individual electricity consumption depends foremost on habit and whether a person stays at home during the day. The study exemplifies that future research and interventions need to decompose actor levels to better understand and target the drivers of private electricity consumption. Methodological challenges in measuring individual and household consumption behaviour are discussed.
Highlights
Energy consumption in buildings—used for space heating, water heating and electrical appliances— caused about 25 % of end-use greenhouse gas emissions in the EU-27 in 2009 (European Environment Agency EEA 2012)
The explanation of electricity consumption represents a difficulty for current environmental research because dependent variables as well as predictors of interest are allocated at the household and the individual level
The present study aims at disentangling the impact of household and individual level predictors to explain electricity consumption at both actor levels
Summary
Energy consumption in buildings—used for space heating, water heating and electrical appliances— caused about 25 % of end-use greenhouse gas emissions in the EU-27 in 2009 (European Environment Agency EEA 2012). Many studies differentiate insufficiently between these distinct actor levels and employ for instance individual environmental attitudes to explain the level of household electricity consumption. They compound household and individual characteristics to explain consumption at the individual or household level (Abrahamse & Steg, 2009; Gatersleben et al 2002; Newton & Meyer, 2012; Poortinga et al 2004; Whitmarsh, 2009). This approach is oversimplifying because the household’s electricity consumption is the outcome of all household members’ (potentially even conflicting) activities, whereas the characteristics of one respondent can no more than approximate the characteristics of all household members (Longhi, 2013; Grønhøj & Ölander, 2007; Grønhøj & Thøgersen, 2009; Thøgersen & Grønhøj, 2010)
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