Household energy resilience in crisis and sustainable transition

Household energy resilience has been brought to the fore by uncertainties in Sweden and abroad, high electricity prices and an increased risk of power shortages. Climate change-related disturbances are also increasingly affecting households. The three fields crisis preparedness, climate change adaptation and sustainable energy transition all link to households' energy resilience and support households through initiatives such as courses, campaigns and advice.

Collaboration between the fields is, however, limited and there is a risk of conflicts between them. For example, preparedness is often associated with ownership of material resources, which makes a sustainable transition more difficult. The project takes a holistic approach to households' energy resilience and identifies synergies and conflicts between initiatives for crisis preparedness, climate adaptation and sustainable energy transition that target households. With design methods, we investigate, and develop concepts for, how initiatives can be designed to strengthen households' overall energy resilience.

The goal of the project is to contribute to strengthening initiatives linked to household energy resilience, by investigating which households current initiatives reach, whether they lead to increased resilience and how initiatives can be designed to enable increased resilience for more people. In the longer term, we believe this can help strengthen the energy resilience of different types of households, so that more people can handle both the ongoing energy transition and energy-related disruptions caused by climate change or other crises while at the same time living an overall good life.

Throughout the project, the results will be communicated in the form of a "resilience box" with material for critical reflection, inspiration for synergies and tools for change, to make it easier for municipalities, companies and non-profit organisations to integrate the results into their initiatives.

The project is funded by the Swedish Energy Agency through the programme Design for energy-efficient everyday life, which is coordinated by SVID. The project is a continuation of the previous project Designing everyday energy resilience.