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Solar water heating provides domestic hot water with lower greenhouse gas emissions compared to more typical natural-gas water heating. Solar water heating has a long history, particularly in places where the climate is favorable, such as California where state-backed incentive programs have been successful in creating small bursts of adoption. However, widespread adoption of solar water heating has not occurred in California despite these conditions. This research surveyed 227 single-family households with solar water heating across the state of California to understand their motivations and experiences, and draw implications regarding barriers to adoption. The survey explored households’ experiences across five stages of adoption, as outlined in Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation theory: Knowledge, Persuasion, Decision, Implementation, and Confirmation. Findings revealed challenges at each stage. Most notably, prevalent disappointment in lower-than-expected energy and bill savings (31%) and high rates of technical problems (41%) appear to be the most significant issues.

Solar thermal water heaters are an old technology used a century ago in California. They are now used extensively, in updated form, in many countries. According to government and industry estimates, well-functioning solar water heaters can theoretically displace 50 to 80 percent of the output of a natural gas-fueled household water heater, depending how hot water usage aligns with production and storage capacities. In so doing, they offer tremendous potential for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, fuel consumption, and energy bills. Such performance holds promise for California given its climate change and energy efficiency policy goals, since 40 percent of the natural gas used in California households is used to produce hot water. However, absent programs, only a specialty market for solar water heaters has developed. To encourage wider deployment, the California Solar Initiative—Thermal program offers financial incentives for systems qualifying under a carefully crafted set of specifications. The program has had some limited success since its inception in 2010. Within that context, this research assessed the performance and potential future use of natural gas-displacing solar water heaters in single-family homes in California, attending to a wide range of sociotechnical considerations. This project documented high diversity in user satisfaction and perceived system performance, and a qualified decrease in project costs to below $5,000 per installation. Solar water heating is a technology in progress, not universally suitable but instead appealing to varied niches shaped by household sensibilities, abilities, and hot water use levels. Thus, recent evolution provides a counterpoint to the pessimism, even as serious difficulties remain. The suitability of solar water heating for California households is not purely a matter of costeffectiveness within a typical energy efficiency framework, but also of evolving performance, perceptions, and values in light of ongoing and aspirational energy and social transitions ahead.

Changes in operations can save 5%-30% of building energy use at low cost, yet these changes are often not implemented. Little attention has been directed to understanding why. This project focused on how building operators approach energy use and conservation in their work, viewing the building as a social system. It drew on interviews, a workshop, surveys, and case studies, learning from operators, facilities staff, researchers, policymakers and occupants.We found two clusters of obstacles to lowered energy use. First, while building operators have the technical means to reduce energy use, social, organizational and technical constraints limit ability and motivation. These include low status, customer service practices, poor feedback on occupant environment, little energy data, and technology design shortcomings. A second cluster of obstacles rests on the fact that current combinations of buildings, management, and expectations leave many occupants dissatisfied with indoor environment.Recommendations call for shifting the locus of energy use reduction strategies to better include building operators, who are in an ideal position to shape and vet solutions. These include (1) increasing status and visibility of building operators; (2) improving ability to see how energy is used; and (3) attending to indoor environment in coordination with energy efficiency.

Building operations connects the building, its performance, and end-users. When there is a mismatch between users’ expectations and operations processes, complaints can arise. This paper investigates whether adopting enhanced complaint handling processes can help diagnose performance problems. Using two LEED platinum-rated office buildings as cases, we describe the components that make up an enhanced complaint handling process, and discuss some of the social dynamics of complaints in buildings. We suggest that enhanced complaint handling might contribute to a form of ongoing commissioning that goes beyond primarily reactive or dismissive treatments of complaints.

Building operations link the building, its performance, and end-users. When there is a mismatch between users’ comfort provision expectations and operations processes, complaints can arise and building performance can suffer. Adopting optimized complaint handling processes can help diagnose performance problems, and thus support improved building performance. There is little discussion in academic literature about this path to improved performance.Usingtwo US, Class A office buildings as cases,we describe the components that make up an enhanced complaint handling process, discuss the social dynamics of complaints in buildings and explain how the process potentially contributes to a type of “continuous commissioning.”

It is a widely accepted fact that buildings must use less energy and reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to help mitigate global climate change. At the same time, buildings are for people: to succeed they must also provide environments that suit their intended occupants. Researchers usually consider these two criteria – reducing GHG emissions and providing good environments for their occupants -- separately despite their close relationship; buildings generally require energy and emit GHGs to produce suitable environments. This building performance case study presents findings about energy use and occupant sentiment together, seeking to uncover new relationships between the two concerns. It considers the designers, owners, operators and occupants’ contributions and relationship to energy use in the California State Teachers Retirement System(CalSTRS) Headquarters building in West Sacramento, California. More specifically, the study investigates how the design and operations processes contribute to the building’s low source energy use intensity, as indicated by its ENERGY STAR rating of 95, while maintaining high occupant satisfaction ratings for building features and indoor environmental quality (IEQ.) The study reviews these satisfaction ratings in light of the low measured energy intensity.This report addresses issues commonly observed in green building design and operations; and the recommendations it includes suggest ways to enhance the design process, improve operations efficiency and increase occupant satisfaction. For these reasons, this report is particularly useful to designers of green office buildings and members of organizations that own and/or operate office buildings.Findings were developed from surveys and interviews of building occupants, building operators, owners’ representatives and facilities staff. These surveys and interviews were performed during spring 2011 and were conducted in close collaboration with Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum (HOK) staff. The project was a collaboration between Center for the Built Environment at the University of California, Berkeley, and PortlandState University.The report proceeds as follows. We begin with a description of the building and its physical context, followed by a discussion of the data and methods used. A discussion of findings is next. Findings related to building performance are presented first, followed by findings related to operations. A summary completes the report

This paper reports on analysis of open-ended survey responses from a commercial building indoor environment satisfaction survey database maintained by the University of California at Berkeley’s Center for the Built Environment. Building from satisfaction ratings and standardised categorical responses collected in surveys for 192 U.S. office buildings, text analysis software is used to analyse text responses to open-ended survey questions, focusing on occupants’ perspectives on the workplace and building overall, temperature, and acoustics. These occupant texts detail interactions between occupants and their physical environment in a technical sense but also interpret these interactions, assess their consequences, and reflect on social relationships and other matters that lie outside dimension-by-dimension assessments of the physical environment. Viewed together these texts reveal a user-centred perspective that points to issues that rest below the surface of more technical analyses of buildings, such as over airconditioning, worker stress and frustration, workplace usability, and relationships between physical and other aspects of the workplace. Attending to this perspective could lead to improvements in occupant experience, building and technology design, building operations, and survey research, as well as inform initiatives that require occupant adaptation and cooperation, including those for greenhouse gas emissions reductions.

This paper reports on analysis of open-ended survey responses in a commercial building occupant indoor environment satisfaction survey database maintained by UC Berkeley. Building on past analyses of Likert-scale satisfaction ratings and categories of dissatisfaction on acoustics, temperature, lighting and overall building and workspace, we use text analysis software to enrich understanding of occupants’ perspectives on what matters about the buildings they work in, and why. These comments detail interactions between occupants and their physical environment, and reflect on expectations, stress, and concerns that lie outside dimension-by-dimension assessments of physical building characteristics. They thus speak to gaps between theories of how buildings work for their occupants and experiences of how they actually do. Together they assert the importance of user-centered views that are currently known through anecdote but poorly incorporated in more clinical or topdown views of building environments.

This paper is one of a series of white papers commissioned by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) to address topics in energy use and behavior. It considers the behavioral assumptions in energy efficiency potential studies, and options for modifying and supplementing these assumptions, using recent California energy efficiency potential studies as the main example.

The Home Energy Saver (HES, http://HomeEnergySaver.lbl.gov) is an interactive web site designed to help residential consumers make decisions about energy use in their homes. This report describes the underlying methods and data for estimating energy consumption. Using engineering models, the site estimates energy consumption for six major categories (end uses); heating, cooling, water heating, major appliances, lighting, and miscellaneous equipment. The approach taken by the Home Energy Saver is to provide users with initial results based on a minimum of user input, allowing progressively greater control in specifying the characteristics of the house and energy consuming appliances. Outputs include energy consumption (by fuel and end use), energy-related emissions (carbon dioxide), energy bills (total and by fuel and end use), and energy saving recommendations. Real-world electricity tariffs are used for many locations, making the bill estimates even more accurate. Where information about the house is not available from the user, default values are used based on end-use surveys and engineering studies. An extensive body of qualitative decision-support information augments the analytical results.

Energy economists have long argued the benefits of real time pricing (RTP) of electricity. Their basis for modeling customers response to short-term fluctuations in electricity prices are based on theories of rational firm behavior, where management strives to minimize operating costs and optimize profit, and labor, capital and energy are potential substitutes in the firm's production function. How well do private firms and public sector institutions operating conditions, knowledge structures, decision-making practices, and external relationships comport with these assumptions and how might this impact price response? We discuss these issues on the basis of interviews with 29 large (over 2 MW) industrial, commercial, and institutional customers in the Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation service territory that have faced day-ahead electricity market prices since 1998. We look at stories interviewees told about why and how they respond to RTP, why some customers report that they can't, and why even if they can, they don't. Some firms respond as theorized, and we describe their load curtailment strategies. About half of our interviewees reported that they were unable to either shift or forego electricity consumption even when prices are high ($0.50/kWh). Reasons customers gave for why they weren't price-responsive include implicit value placed on reliability, pricing structures, lack of flexibility in adjusting production inputs, just-in-time practices, perceived barriers to onsite generation, and insufficient time. We draw these observations into a framework that could help refine economic theory of dynamic pricing by providing real-world descriptions of how firms behave and why.

Historically, residential energy and carbon saving efforts have targeted conventional end uses such as water heating, lighting and refrigeration. The emergence of new household appliances has transformed energy use from a few large and easily identifiable end uses into a broad array of "miscellaneous" energy services. This group of socalled miscellaneous appliances has been a major contributor to growth in electricity demand in the past two decades. We use industry shipment data, lifetimes, and wattage and usage estimates of over 90 individual products to construct a bottom-up end use model (1976-2010). The model is then used to analyze historical and forecasted growth trends, and to identify the largest individual products within the miscellaneous end use. We also use the end use model to identify and analyze policy priorities. Our forecast projects that over the period 1996 to 2010, miscellaneous consumption will increase 115 TWh, accounting for over 90 percent of future residential electricity growth. A large portion of this growth will be due to halogen torchiere lamps and consumer electronics, making these two components of miscellaneous electricity a particularly fertile area for efficiency programs. Approximately 20 percent (40 TWh) of residential miscellaneous electricity is "leaking electricity" or energy consumed by appliances when they are not performing their principal function. If the standby power of all appliances with a standby mode is reduced to one watt, the potential energy savings equal 21 TWh/yr, saving roughly $1-2 billion annually.

This study describes a pilot effort to measure load reductions from a residential electric water heater (EWH) load control program using low-cost statistically based measurement and verification (M&V) approaches. This field experiment is described within the larger framework of overcoming barriers to participation of nonintervai metered customers in Demand Response (DR) Programs. We worked with PJM Interconnection and a Curtailment Service Provider (CSP) to collect hourly load data for two substations and several hundred households over six weeks of load control testing. The experimental design reflected constraints imposed by limited funding, manpower, equipment, and the routine operation of the load control system by the CSP. We analyzed substation- and premise-level data from these tests in an attempt to verify several 'point estimates' taken from the hourly diversified demand curves used by the CSP to establish aggregate load reductions from their control program. Analysis of premise-level data allowed for provisional verification that the actual electric water heater load control impacts were within a--60 to + 10% band of the estimated values. For sub-station level data, measured values of per-unit load impacts were generally lower than the CSP estimated values for Electric Cooperative #2, after accounting for confounding influences and operational test problems. Based on this experience we offer recommendations to ISO and utility DR program managers to consider before undertaking further development of alternatives to the conventional but costly program-wide load research approach. Index Terms--Demand management, electricity markets, load control, load management, load shedding, statistics, substation measurements, water heating.

Studies reveal that 90% of future residential electricity growth will come from miscellaneous end use. The use of consumer electronics and halogen torchiere lamps are the major factors that cause an increase in electricity bills, accounting for approximately 100 TWh of current consumption and 65 TWh of forecasted growth. Several ways to reduce miscellaneous energy use include reducing the use of standby modes in consumer electronics, replacing halogen torchieres with fluorescent models, and improving the efficiency of fans for fuel-fired furnaces.

What if we used the stories that researchers and practitioners tell each other as tools to advance interdisciplinary disaster research? This article hypothesizes that doing so could foster a new mode of collaborative learning and discovery. People, including researchers, regularly tell stories to relate "what happened" based on their experience, often in ways that augment or contradict existing understandings. These stories provide naturalistic descriptions of context, complexity, and dynamic relationships in ways that formal theories, static data, and interpretations of findings can miss. They often do so memorably and engagingly, which makes them beneficial to researchers across disciplines and allows them to be integrated into their own work. Seeking out, actively inviting, sharing, and discussing these stories in interdisciplinary teams that have developed a strong sense of trust can therefore provide partial escape from discipline‐specific reasoning and frameworks that are so often unconsciously employed. To develop and test this possibility, this article argues that the diverse and rapidly growing hazards and disaster field needs to incorporate a basic theoretical understanding of stories, building from folkloristics and other sources. It would also need strategies to draw out and build from stories in suitable interdisciplinary research forums and, in turn, to find ways to incorporate the discussions that emanate from stories into ongoing analyses, interpretations, and future lines of interdisciplinary inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]