Should end-users take their clothes off inside on a cold winter's day? Sustainability pressures on district heating professionals in Denmark

Abstract

This research explores how district heating (DH) sector professionals /employees experience the low-carbon energy transitions-related change processes in the Danish heat supply sector. Enquiry draws upon mixed data collected among DH employees from 148 utilities. Geels’ triple embeddedness framework conceptualizes the connections between regime-level actor experiences of niche- and landscape-level pressures, sustainability imperatives, and the associated change processes. This neo-institutionalist perspective finds that the historically stable DH regime-level institutions are being destabilised. It also reveals the tensions and change inertia associated with, for example, sunk costs, infrastructural path dependencies, and professional culture. For the DH professionals, and regime-level actors, these destabilization processes challenge what were previously core regime-level professional practices, skills and taken-for-granted standards for a job well done. Indeed, professional identity and pride may be at stake. Paradoxically, the identified DH sector norms for stable, affordable, and invisible heat supply service provision may not necessarily motivate DH end-users /customers towards more sustainable heat-use behaviours: DH end-users in Denmark have come to expect these DH community heat supply provision as taken-for-granted societal goods, and the topics of space heating and thermal comfort are increasingly dissociated from consumption-related debates within public, and political realms. This DH case study shows how landscape, regime, and actor-level socio-technical trajectories interact, and it exemplifies actor-structure relationships in situations of regime stress. Perhaps it proves an exemplary case for exploring the lock-in mechanisms, inertia, restraints, and potentials of change-processes within also other societal domains and institutional realms.