Lessons learnt

Three key lessons learnt:

• Social housing tenants can be helped to optimise their energy use behaviour with ICT-based energy awareness services and savings in energy of the order of 10% or more appear feasible;
• Tenants in social housing cannot be expected immediately to appreciate the usefulness of information services even delivered by traditional techniques (paper);
• Data transfer and storage modalities and contractual relationships for the provision of energy awareness services must be carefully considered in terms of competitive positions of contributors and against the stipulations of European data protection legislation.

Lessons learnt from the tenant survey

The first lessons of the project concern the results of the tenant survey about their environment and energy knowledge.

From the answers to this large survey, we may conclude that there is a strong interest from the tenants of European social housings to get qualified information on their energy consumption and an obvious need of advice on saving potential measures that are possible for them.

Social housing companies are considered by tenants as the appropriate actor to provide this kind of information.

Therefore, due to increasing electronic metering, the necessary information on energy consumption pattern on a monthly basis will be available to housing company, either already today or in the near future.

This fact shall be used to develop a qualified information service for the tenants, using adequate information channels (paper, posters in the building entrances, letters and Internet tenant portal).

This guide will be completed with the feedback of the use by tenants of the Energy Awareness Services when the evaluation will be done (end the heating season 2008-2009) and the issues of the transferability in other countries will be addressed in the final guide.

Research into tenant energy consumption behaviour, attitudes and information requirements is essential for selecting options in respect of service components, their design and SAVE4Homes Energy Awareness specifications. Therefore this broad survey collected quantitative data from tenants of social housing in three European countries about issues relevant for energy saving and interests in information how to optimise this. The survey aimed to identify gaps in knowledge and typical “wrongdoing” in energy consumption and to forecast the acceptability of the planned energy awareness services. 2.637 tenants took part in the survey - 1507 women (58 %) and 1080 men (42 %).The survey was carried out between March and June 2007 - depending on local conditions either paper-based by mail or by telephone or by face to face interviews. The number of respondents in France and Germany was very similar (about 1.000 each). In Northern Ireland, where only one partner is involved, more than 500 tenants were interviewed

The most important results are:

• Most respondent tenants of social housing are 60 and more years old (39 %). In general they live on low income levels and/or social security benefits. 46 % of the households only have a monthly net household income up to 900 €. Often they have no private access to a computer (61 %) and no access to internet (63 %).
• Most tenants are worried about the climate change (57 %) and feel themselves as being aware of environmental issues (60 % “very much aware” and “quite aware”). Saving money (27 %) motivates tenants more to save energy than protecting the environment (10 %). For the most (63 %) both are of equal importance.
• Most tenants value their own energy consumption as medium (58 %). On the other hand the collected data show a set of possibilities to tap the full potential of energy saving - for example improvements in ventilation and heating behaviour. Primarily in France has to be considered that a lot of tenants (15 %) cannot adjust the setting of their heating/radiators by themselves.
• Although most tenants feel well informed about environmental issues in general, (63 % “very well informed” and “fairly well informed”) they otherwise describe gaps in knowledge about the consumption of energy in their flats/houses and about the possibilities of saving energy there. Up to now they get information from TV (77 %), newspapers (62 %) and brochures (50 %), but often they value these channels as insufficient in order to satisfy their information need.
• Most tenants are interested in a service which gives an exact overview of their energy consumption and hints about how to save energy. Tenants are mostly interested in current consumption figures (74 %) and information about how to save electricity, water heating and space heating (electricity 77 %, water heating 73 %, space heating 72 %). They prefer pamphlets (86 %) because for the lack of private computers or notebooks with an internet access.
• Most tenants want to use it regularly, but they don’t want to pay for that (75 %).