By Kasper Dirckinck-Holmfeld
Department of Development and Planning, Aalborg University Copenhagen, A.C. Meyers Vænge 15
DK-2450 Copenhagen SV Email: kadir@plan.aau.dk
Abstract (
Energy savings in companies are viewed effective to reduce Green House Gas emissions (GHG). Various barriers hinder the implementation of otherwise profitable energy savings. In this article SMEs challenges are presented as encountered during the Carbon 20 project.
Seven Danish municipalities have engaged 120 SMEs in reducing their GHG emissions with 20%. The enterprises have been offered energy screenings free of charge and an active facilitation by the municipalities during the subsequent implementation.
The objective is to empirically assess the character of the challenges as feedback to the municipal officers to adapt their facilitation strategies. The article is based on qualitative data asking the municipal officers’ interpretation of the enterprises challenges instead of asking the enterprises own ranking of predefined barriers. The findings supplement the existing literature on barriers for implementing energy savings by applying different methods.
A myriad of different challenges are found for SMEs implementation of energy savings. The majority of these resemble categorisations of barriers highlighted in the reviewed literature.
The analysis of the statements reveals, however, that these challenges covers a diversity of different specific situations that calls for quite different approaches and means for how the municipalities can facilitate enterprises to address them.
Highlights (
- A qualitative assessment of SMEs challenges for implementing energy savings are conducted
- The findings provides feedback to Danish municipalities facilitation strategies
- The findings align earlier quantitative surveys on the overall challenges encountered the most
- The statements still point at differences between related categories of challenges
- These differences are decisive for how to influence enterprises to address the challenges.
Keywords: Energy efficiency, Challenges and barriers, Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SME), Local facilitation programs, Green House Gas emissions
1.(Introduction(
Energy savings and energy efficiency improvements are claimed to be effective means to reduce GHG emissions. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) argued in their 2007 report that energy savings in industry are cost-efficient means to achieve reductions of Green House Gas (GHG) emissions (IPCC, 2007).
Jaffe and Stavins (1994) argue that a gap exists between profitable energy savings and savings actually implemented. This gab justify that political actions are taking (Jaffe and Stavins, 1994; Paton 2001). Several scholars have provided input to explain this gap from both theoretical insight and from quantitative empirical surveys (Armstead, 2012; Brown 2001; Jaffe and Stavins, 2005; Fleiter et al. 2012;
Lees, 2012; Thollander et al. 2007; Sorrell et al. 2011).
This article supplements this knowledge by a qualitative analysis of challenges that enterprises have encountered during participating in the EU Life+ project, Carbon 20 (LIFE09 ENV/DK/000366).
Seven Danish municipalities32 and Aalborg University (AAU) have carried out the Carbon 20 project from 2011-2013. The project has engaged 120 Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SME) to reduce their GHG emissions with 20 % during the period. This has covered a variety of enterprises from micro firms and shops with less than 10 employees, to larger productions sites (still within EU definition of SME), but also offices, restaurants and transportation business etc. See Figure 1 and 2
32 Including Copenhagen as the capital, three suburb municipalities surrounding it (Albertslund, Allerød and Ballerup), and three middle seized municipalities - two in Jutland (Herning and Kolding) and one in West Zealand (Næstved)
Figure 1 - Number and size of participant companies, Source: Own production based on data referred in Aalborg University (2014)
Figure 2 - Type of participating enterprises, Source: Own production Aalborg University (2014)
In the Carbon 20 project the municipalities offered the enterprises a facilitated process of: providing an initial screenings of possible energy savings free of charge;
agreeing on relevant options for implementation; and subsequent follow-up visits
on the enterprises implementation (see
http://www.carbon20.dk/carbon20InEnglish/).
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Thollander et al. (2007) point out that offering an initial screening free of charge influences the results of challenges as the purpose is to provide information that otherwise may be lacking (Thollander et al. 2007). The possibility of municipalities to offer such screenings is thereby a prerequisite for the findings of this article. The municipalities continued possibility for offering such is analysed in a previous paper (Dirckinck-Holmfeld, 2012), and will not be address further here.
The article supplements existing knowledge on challenges of enterprises for implementing energy savings. Most existing research is based on quantitative surveys of the enterprises’ own ranking of different predefined barriers (e.g.
Bradford and Fraser, 2008; Fleiter et al. 2012; Thollander et al. 2007). This article instead takes the municipalities’ point of view and is based on their explorative statements of how they perceive the challenges encountered by the specific enterprises.
The objective is to gather insight into the character of the encountered challenges as feedback to how the municipal officers can adapt their facilitating strategies.
2.(Methods(
The empirical data has been collected in connection with monitoring the progress of the Carbon 20 project. In total three monitoring reports have been made covering respective 2011, 2012 and 2013. Data from the two latter forms the main empirical base of this paper (Reports available at http://www.carbon20.dk/Publikationer/).
As part of the monitoring process in 2012, environmental officers from the seven municipalities were interviewed face-to-face in form of either single interviews with key involved officers, or focus group interviews with all involved local officers. In the interviews, the municipal officers were asked about the progress of each participating enterprise including whether any challenges had been encountered.
For the final monitoring process in 2013, the key involved local officers of the project answered a questionnaire with open-ended explorative questions about status for each company including updates on encountered challenges. Some of the officers distribute some of the questions directly to the participating enterprises.
Consequently, minor parts of the applied data are from enterprises directly.
These specific data are supplemented by observations and notes from other project activities during the three years period including: progress meetings with all partners of Carbon 20 and at the specific municipalities; various conferences and
workshops, specific interactions with enterprises and ad hoc interviews with them in prolongation.
The processing of data has taken “a grounded approach”33 following three iterative steps:
1) Some overall categorisations of challenges were made in order to gather related statements. The preliminary categorisation where based on the insights from the discussions during the various Carbon 20 activities during the first two years as well as initial processing of 2012 monitoring interviews.
2) Inspired by a literature review on challenges, obstacles and barriers for enterprises implementation of energy savings (see section 3) this categorisation was adapted for the final processing of the data. The categorisation applied in this article is thereby based iteratively on both:
the preliminary insights (step 1), and inspiration from previous literature (step 2).
3) In the processing of empirical data from both the 2012 monitoring interviews as well as the 2013 monitoring final questionnaire, the collected statements on encountered challenges by the specific enterprises was grouped into the established categorisations in an excel sheet covering also the participating enterprises size, type and GHG emissions.
The processing of the various related statements revealed, however, a need for a further elaboration and diversification of established categories as the challenges still diverted in respect to how the municipalities can facilitate companies to address and overcome such challenges. Subcategories were therefore established afterwards – however, not provided separate cell in the excel sheet.
This “grounded approach” departs from most of the previous contributions reviewed in next chapter by:
• Asking for qualitative, explorative and open-ended statements on perceived challenges, and
33 A ”grounded approach” means here that the categorisation departs from the empirical data rather than theoretical predefinitions – applying “bottom up” gathering of related qualitative statements in contrast to asking for ranking of predefined categories in quantitative surveys.
Within the energy gab literature “bottom-up” is used with a specific different meaning referring specifically to one kind of energy data derived from specific companies in contrast to overall average energy data (e.g. Koopmans and te Velde, 2001), why the “grounded”
term is applied here instead.
• Asking the municipal officers having the direct interaction with enterprises about their perception of the encountered challenges for the specific enterprises
Qualitative, explorative statements provide the opportunity to empirically assess, what is perceived to be the challenges at hand instead of “solely” confirming and quantifying any theoretical or other general predefined assumptions about the challenges.
Asking second parties involved specifically in the interaction with the enterprises in question provides an outsider judgement of the actual challenges for that company.
This opposite also has limitations in terms of being the author’s judgement based on qualitative divert statements that already represent a second parts judgement of the challenges encountered by the enterprises.
All the empirical data collected is in Danish. The various citations of statements in this paper are the author’s own translation into English. Unless stated otherwise, the citations of statements are from the interviewed officers from the municipal in question – either the face-to-face interview or qualitative questionnaire.