With increasing urbanization it has become increasingly important to focus on reducing emissions at a residential level. Decisions of households to adopt emissions reducing technologies are influenced not just by economic factors, but by the type of social networks they are embedded in. There is however little insight into the relationship between underlying networks and effectiveness of policy interventions. This thesis builds a Data-Driven Agent-based Model grounded in Theory of Planned Behavior, initialised with synthetic household population for a case-study of Albany County, (New York, USA). It uses network modelling to study how social network structures influence adoption rates of different communities. Results show that flat tax-credit schemes can result in poor adoption rates in segregated networks, with performance worsening if the network size is small. Seeding policies and information agents, do not necessarily result in better adoption rates, highlighting the importance of trusted information sources than mass communicators. The resulting understanding of social networks’ influence over adoption of energy-efficient technologies can assist policy-makers in designing energy policy interventions that improve access of clean energy technologies for all socioeconomic groups.

Providing heat is a key aspect of social life and a necessity for comfort and health in cold climates. Even though heat accounts for a large proportion of worldwide carbon emissions and is the largest energy end-use, it has remained largely untouched by efforts to decarbonize. Efforts to do so meet significant economic, social-psychological, technical and political challenges. Much is at stake. But what can make a difference? One increasingly discussed potential solution is co-creation. It provides spaces for citizens to share what heating means to them and for stakeholders to build these insights into their programmes for change. However, while local authorities, grassroots, and community organisations are already implementing co-creation with homeowners and groups of citizens, there is a dearth of academic research focusing on the value of co-creating sustainable heating transitions. This indicates a lack of evidence on how these new forms of collaboration perform under which conditions and how they are embedded in the policy cycle. Drawing on European sustainable heating case studies where co-creation has been applied, we outline future areas where critical, engaged research could help us to understand how to unlock sustainable heating transitions.@en