Tailor your instruments to context

This Tool group offers you advice on the following instruments and on how to tailor them to your context:

  • Energy advice
  • Energy audits
  • Financial support and services
  • Information and education campaigns
  • Metering and feedback
  • Voluntary programmes and commitments

Click on the headings below to read more about the instruments that are relevant for you. The first section of each tool explains what problems (see Step 1) the instruments are appropriate for, and the following sections explain how to adapt them to context.

Energy advice involves guidance for your target group that is specific to situation and actions that can be taken. Advice is interactive and can help to remove or reduce the following problems:

  • Lack of knowledge, skills and attention
  • Lack of personalised and context-relevant information in the right time and place

Advice can help both to change routine and habitual behaviour and to trigger energy efficiency investments.

An energy audit includes an inspection of the building and equipment, how it is used, identification of savings potentials and measures, and recommendations on measures to save energy. Energy audits can be helpful instruments to solve the following problems:

Financial support and services refers to grants, loans and financial services like energy service companies (ESCOs) or energy performance contracting. They aim to remove or reduce the following problems:

  • lack of incentives to invest in energy efficiency
  • lack of capital
  • perceived risks and benefits of energy efficiency investments

These instruments mainly relate to energy-efficiency investment decisions.

Information and education are based on information provision through different communication channels, such as the mass media and schools, but  also local events and peer-to-peer networks. Information and education campaigns are instruments that can provide a partial solution to the following problems:

Metering and feedback help to make energy use visible and show how effective the changed behaviour has been. They help to reduce the following problems:

  • Invisibility of energy use
  • Lack of knowledge of one's own energy use
  • Lack of feedback on the effectiveness of actions

Metering and feedback are used particularly to influence routine and habitual energy behaviours, but they can also help your target group verify the actual impact of efficiency investments on later energy use.

Voluntary programmes and commitments aim to enhance your target group’s engagement with energy issues and create social support and pressure for change in energy use patterns. Usually, your target group will strive to meet some targets and is acknowledged for doing so. They can help to reduce the following problems: