Keeping Australian homes warm in winter, cool in summer

With the recent cold snap and damaging winds across Australia’s southeast, many Australians are feeling the chill – and realising their homes aren’t great at keeping them warm.

Climate change, extreme weather and rising energy costs are pushing Australia to make every existing home energy-efficient. And this needs to happen quickly. But how do we make this both possible and affordable?

Most of Australia's homes have poor energy and thermal performance, and roughly 80% of Australian homes have energy-efficiency ratings of two stars or less out of 10. This means these homes are often too cold in winter, too hot in summer, and sometimes even unsafe to live in.

To tackle this problem, state and local governments and community groups are creating ambitious programs to help people upgrade their homes. The Australian federal government has announced 1.3 billion in funding to make homes more energy-efficient and switch to electric appliances.

That’s where the Energy Upgrades for Australian Homes (EUAH) project comes in. Led by The Monash Sustainable Development Institute (MSDI), the goal of the project is to support this home energy transition by equipping program organisers with the knowledge and tools needed to design more effective, engaging, and impactful home energy upgrade programs.

Through recent interviews and research with existing and past home energy upgrade program leads, several key questions and challenges have emerged as important to address for program success.

These key barriers are outlined below. Based on these insights, as well as cross-thematic research, EUAH will develop an online platform that will address these challenges differently.

Tailoring programs to household motivations

One of the key challenges for program success is to understand and influence householder home energy behaviours. A lack of knowledge about what people can do in their homes to save energy, stay warm and reduce energy costs is a big challenge for improving energy efficiency.

Energy efficiency is often a complex concept for households to grasp, and misleading information or questionable marketing have made householders suspicious.

Sometimes more information can even lead to decision overload, and when people feel overwhelmed, they may abandon their upgrading journey altogether. This makes it difficult for program organisers to present information in a simple and easy-to-understand manner that motivates people to take action.

On top of that, different parts of a community such as young families, older residents, or immigrants, may have vastly different motivations for upgrading and quite unique reasons when they choose not to.

Without a deep understanding of what drives these decisions, program organisers risk developing initiatives that fail to resonate with their target audience or address the real obstacles to adoption.

EUAH is seeking to address these challenges through comprehensive research on household energy upgrade behaviours, and the diverse influencing factors that either enable or prevent these behaviours. By identifying key energy efficiency upgrade behaviours, program organisers will be able to target them more effectively.

Through this knowledge, EUAH will enable the development of more personalised and targeted program approaches that support behaviour change in relation to energy-efficiency upgrades. These insights will also allow for the creation of user-friendly upgrade pathways that provide the right support and motivation at the right time when householders embark on renovations or when replacing an existing appliance.

Getting upgrades right

When householders decide to upgrade, they want to know whether products, suppliers and service providers are trustworthy, high-quality, cost-effective and available. With recent reports of low-quality water pumps and other appliances flooding the Australian market, homeowners understandably continue to show distrust in energy upgrade technologies.

The issue extends beyond the technologies themselves. It’s also about the people who supply and install them. Program organisers need to screen, select and monitor suppliers to ensure they’re honest and reliable, and meet program targets for safety and quality. However, vetting suppliers can be challenging because of liability concerns or the requirement to remain impartial towards service providers.

To address these challenges, EUAH will investigate different home energy upgrade products in terms of their costs and benefits, as well as their availability and the strength of their supply chain.

EUAH will provide orientation and guidance to program organisers about the effects of upgrades on energy use, carbon emissions, as well as their costs and co-benefits for individual households and communities.

Engaging and mobilising the community

Successful home energy upgrade programs need to be attuned to local conditions and a community’s connection to its place and identity. Clearly, the growing number of community-driven sustainability initiatives are in a good position to help local residents upgrade because they understand what matters to their local community.

Despite community groups’ strong connection to place and people, program organisers find it challenging to engage and mobilise all members of their community, and not only the usual suspects. Certain groups of a community, such as busy families with young children, can be difficult to engage.

Informing people about a program’s existence, its details, and how to proceed with home upgrades can be challenging. Motivation to participate is also severely impacted by the complexity of the upgrading process involving many suppliers, service providers, and a significant capital investment.

These community engagement and mobilisation challenges are a big hurdle for program organisers, and reduce participation rates. EUAH addresses this challenge by developing methods that allow program organisers to develop programs collaboratively with communities.

This will ensure that programs are fit for purpose, and that the needs, preferences and aspirations of communities are integrated into their design.

Trust and local context are key ingredients

Central to all the challenges and solutions described above is the concepts of trust and approaches tailored to local conditions. Programs that are targeted and tailored to geographic, social, cultural, political, technological and environmental context are more effective.

Householders must also feel confident that programs offer high-quality and reliable products, services and suppliers. They must feel sure that the program they’re engaging with has their best interest at heart, can deliver a relevant service for their needs, and simplifies difficult choices.

As more home energy upgrade programs are initiated in Australia, being able to earn this trust and tailor programs to local aspirations will be critical to success.

The goal of EUAH is to support people and communities with upgrading their homes so that energy bills and carbon emissions are reduced.

To ensure home energy upgrades work in practice, for real people with real lives, no matter where in Australia they live, program organisers can get this energy upgrade “snapshot” of Australian households via an EUAH online platform in real time.

It will provide access to up-to-date information about existing policies and regulations, best-practice delivery models, household and community behaviour patterns, existing housing stock information, and supply chain intelligence.

By supporting people and communities to improve their homes through better programs, the ambitious project will harness real-world insights, and help upgrade one million existing Australian homes by 2030.

This article was co-authored with Jessica Hyne, Lead, Communications and Outreach, Climate-KIC Australia.