The current energy, climate and cost of living crises have affected peoples’ wellbeing, their health, employment and finances showing significant inequalities across population groups and regions. These kinds of challenges entail technological innovation while shifting energy consumption patterns. Yet, the UK transition to Net Zero requires greater transformative change at institutional, infrastructural, sectorial and social levels. Building on Multi Criteria Mapping and survey methods, this paper investigates how citizens value energy demand reduction options for communities’ wellbeing and identifies multiple social, economic, and environmental ‘co-benefits’, often discounted in policy making. While arguing that energy demand mitigation options can improve citizens’ living conditions and quality of life while diminishing energy use and GHG emissions, the paper challenges the adoption of approaches based on conventional economic models to deliver Net Zero. The analysis of two UK-based case studies discloses that citizens prioritise fairness including environmental intergenerational concerns and value restrictions on individuals’ lifestyle choices. The paper calls for better incorporation of citizens’ values in policy on energy demand reduction.This proposal responds to a call from the Research Councils for a national Centre on energy demand research, building on the work of the existing six End Use Energy Demand Centres, for which funding ends in April 2018. Energy demand reduction is a UK success story, with a 15% fall in final energy consumption since 2004. Major further reductions are possible and will be needed, as part of a transformation of the energy system to low carbon, to deliver the goals of the Paris Agreement and the UK carbon budgets. Moreover, a low carbon energy system will be increasingly reliant upon inflexible and variable electricity generation, and therefore demand will also need to become more flexible. In short, changes in energy demand reduction will need to go further and faster, and demand will need to become more flexible. These challenges have far-reaching implications for technology, business models, social practices and policy. Our vision is for energy demand research in the UK to rise to these challenges. The Centre's ambition is to lead whole systems work on energy demand in the UK, collaborating with a wider community both at home and internationally. We aim to deliver globally leading research on energy demand, to secure much greater impact for energy demand research and to champion the importance of energy demand for delivering environmental, social and economic goals. Our research programme is inter-disciplinary, recognising that technical and social change are inter-dependent and co-evolve. It is organised into six Themes. Three of these address specific issues in the major sectors of energy use, namely: buildings, transport and industry. The remaining three address more cross-cutting issues that drive changing patterns of demand, namely the potential for increased flexibility, the impact of digital technologies, and energy policy and governance. Each Theme has a research programme that has been developed with key stakeholders and will provide the capacity for the Centre to inform debate, deliver impact and share knowledge in its specific area of work. The Themes will also undertake collaborative work, with our first joint task being to assess the role of energy demand in delivering the objectives of the UK Government's Clean Growth Plan. The Centre will also include Challenges that respond to cross-thematic questions for UK energy demand. These will mostly be developed in consultation over the early years of the Centre, and therefore only one is included in the initial plan: on the decarbonisation of heat. The Centre will function as a national focus for inter-disciplinary research on energy demand. In doing this it will need to respond to a rapidly evolving energy landscape. It will therefore retain 25% of its funds to allocate during the lifetime of the Centre through a transparent governance process. These funds will support further challenges and a 'Flexible Fund', which will be used to support research on emerging research questions, in particular through support for early career researchers. We are working closely with key stakeholders in business and policy to design our research programme and we plan detailed knowledge exchange activities to ensure that the work of the UK energy demand research community has broader societal impact.

We undertook a survey and focus group on each case study region. For the survey, respondents were asked about the extent of their approval or disapproval of 14 demand-side mitigation measures and to choose their top 3 measures contributing to overall wellbeing, based on a set of 20 wellbeing indicators, as well as to give their preferences for different funding options. The survey was conducted in two phases between June and September 2022. In the first phase, from June to July, two researchers conducted the survey face-to-face with randomly selected residents in Brighton, gathering 46 responses. To gain a higher number of responses, a second phase was conducted using a market research company to generate a range of online responses in the Greater Brighton (GRB) and North of Tyne (NoT) regions. This generated a further 566 respondents aged between 18-65+, giving a combined total of 621 respondents, of which 343 were in the Greater Brighton region and 269 in the North of Tyne region. From the findings of the survey, 6 mitigation measures were selected to be discussed in more detail in the focus groups – 2 of the most preferred, 2 mid-range and 2 least preferred measures. In the focus group, we asked participants to score a range of measures according to their contribution to a set of wellbeing indicators and then to weigh those indicators using a version of a multi-criteria mapping (MCM) method. For each focus group, 25 participants were selected by the market research company, using random stratified sampling to ensure diversity in terms of gender, ethnicity, rural/urban location, employment and political party support. Participants were asked to discuss in groups and then score individually (with a brief justification) the selected set of 6 mitigation measures in relation to 6 wellbeing indicators. This provided qualitative insights into factors influencing participants’ responses, as well as quantitative insights into their relative preferences for different mitigation measures. The wellbeing indicators were selected based on the literature to include 2 social indicators, 2 economic indicators and 2 environmental indicators in order to cover a range of potential benefits. The focus groups were held in accessible locations in Brighton in December 2022 for the Greater Brighton case study and in Newcastle in February 2023 for the North of Tyne case study. The focus groups allowed the triangulation of the data since participants contributed specific insights that could not be investigated in the survey. During the workshops, an adapted version of MCM was used as “an interactive appraisal method for exploring contrasting perspectives on complex strategic and policy issues. MCM is conceived as a tool for individual or small group interviews where participants define their own criteria. The tool aims to help 'open up' technical assessment by systematically 'mapping' the practical implications of alternative options, issues, uncertainties and values” (UoS, 2023).