Invisible Energy and the Academies Programme: Challenges and Opportunities for energy demand reduction

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Energy demand reduction has been identified as core to the UK government's efforts to address climate change and meet commitments to net zero targets (Eyre and Killip, 2019). Previous EPSRC funded research has signalled the importance of looking beyond technological innovation and energy policy to understand how other policy areas impact energy demand (Cox et al. 2019; Royston et al. 2018; Butler et al. 2018). This cutting-edge research agenda into so called 'invisible energy policy' represents a burgeoning but as yet under addressed area of analysis (Royston et al. 2018). By re-framing the Academies Programme [AP] in the education sector as a 'non-energy' or 'invisible energy' policy, this project will contribute to essential understandings of the effects of non-energy policy on energy demand. With its direct focus on policy and practice, this project targets the broader social and regulatory environments within which energy use and human actions intersect. The project involves collaboration with Manning's Tutors [MT] and their academy partners to co-design case biography interview questions and examine two types of secondary longitudinal data: documentary and energy use. The research will contribute to the academic debate on 'non-energy policy' and wider societal debates on energy demand reduction in education. To inform future practice and policy, the results will be codified into (coproduced) demand reduction recommendations that will feed directly into the collaborators' practice, as well as being distributed more widely through energy seminars and policy consultations.