IIASA-RITE International Workshop
Towards improved understanding, concepts, policies and models of energy demand

The workshop buildt on earlier cooperation between the two institutions that included the Low Energy Demand (LED) scenario and a demand workshop held in Nara, Japan in 2018.

The objective of the workshop was to review progress in concepts, analyses and modeling of energy demand from an interdisciplinary perspective and using the concepts of delivered services and human well-being as entry point. The workshop aimed to start a process of focusing the discussion on the current understanding (and of research gaps) of energy demand and efficiency management and policies to also include implementation issues of demand-side strategies. An additional objective of the workshop was to provide a forum to discuss how demand issues are dealt with in various chapters of the ongoing IPCC AR6.

The workshop hosted 14 young “next generation” researchers that study demand issues, who had been selected in a competitive process. They presented their research in a poster session format on the following illustrative topics:
• Conceptual/theoretical work that further a deeper understanding of determinants of energy and other resource (water, food, materials) service demands
• Empirical work to describe and explain heterogeneity of service demands across different social groups and cultures
• Research exploring linkages between service levels and structure and human well-being (incl. sufficiency and decent living standards concepts)
• Research on novel business and organizational models with a focus on “usership” rather than ownership
• Modeling applications to simulate policy interventions in service demands
• Studies that explore the interlinks between various resource services (e.g. energy and water, food, materials)

At the workshop, all posters were judged by a committee that handed out five awards to the most outstanding poster presenters, judging them for the quality of their scientific work, their presentations, and novel contribution to the field of demand-side research.

The background of the Workshop and the agenda with links are collected in a short summary. Key points and conclusions of the presentations and discussions are summarized in the Workshop Report.

Background paper: Grubler A , Wilson C , Bento N, Boza-Kiss B, Krey V , McCollum D, Rao N , Riahi K , et al. (2018). A low energy demand scenario for meeting the 1.5 °C target and sustainable development goals without negative emission technologies. Nature Energy 3 (6): 517-525. DOI:10.1038/s41560-018-0172-6.

Last edited: 08 September 2020