Capturing Consumers’ Awareness and the Intention to Support Carbon Neutrality through Energy Efficient Consumption

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.