Despite improved access, around 1.9 billion people will be lacking access to clean cooking fuel (CCF) by 2030, posing serious threats. G20 nations, with 85
As electricity systems transition towards higher shares of renewable generation, demand-side flexibility becomes increasingly important for managing peak demand and mitigating grid congestion. Households play a central role in this transition, yet behavioural engagement in load shifting remains limited. While prior research has largely focused on financial incentives, comparatively little attention has been paid to psychological barriers that impede behavioural change. This study examines hassle, an effort-based psychological barrier, as a determinant of household load shifting behaviour in the Dutch context. Using a large-scale survey of Dutch households (n = 1506), we investigate the role of hassle and habit strength in shaping the manual shifting of three practices: electric vehicle charging, laundry, and dishwashing. We conceptualise hassle as a multidimensional construct and distinguish between six types of hassle: Informational, Planning, Social, Temporal-fit, Operational, and Availability-related (IPSTOA), which are mapped onto different stages of the decision-making process spanning Awareness, Consideration, and Action. Regression analyses show that 1) higher perceived hassle is consistently associated with lower reported load shifting across practices, with habit automaticity moderating this relationship, and 2) different types of hassle emerge for different types of load shifting practices. Preliminary evidence was gathered by employing a stage-specific perspective of hassle. Compared with non-solar households, solar households appeared to be further along the load-shifting decision process, with Consideration- and Action-stage hassles becoming more prominent, whereas among non-solar households, hassle only played a meaningful role once households had already initiated load shifting. For policy makers and energy companies these findings highlight the importance of tailoring behavioural interventions to both the household practice and the stage of behavioural change. For modellers, they provide empirically grounded insights into psychological friction that can improve the behavioural realism of system-level energy models.
The construction industry is one of the largest energy-consuming and carbon-emitting sectors, leading to significant environmental consequences. Despite numerous initiatives and policies aimed at achieving energy efficiency and decarbonization, implementation strategies and tools face several challenges. This study explores the evolution of building energy efficiency strategies, alongside their analytical tools, examining their interconnections to identify gaps. An integrated methodology that combines bibliometric and scoping analyses was utilized within a systematic framework to identify influential strategies and tools and to examine their thematic evolution. This study makes several key contributions: it identifies eight clusters of strategies and five functionalities of analytical tools. Additionally, eight challenges and gaps were pinpointed, and nine future research directions were proposed to enhance building energy efficiency.
