Study title

Interviews with actors concerned with local transport decarbonisation in the UK, including challenges related to finance, governance arrangements, and public support. Data were collected using a series of 54 interviews, spread equally across three case study sites: 18 Nottingham, 18 Leeds, and 18 Oxford. Of those, 12 of the Nottingham interviews, all 18 of the Leeds interviews, and 8 of the Oxford interviews are shared in this data deposit (the rest did not give permission for their data to be deposited). The interviews were designed to reveal different local perspectives on areas’ recent attempts to decarbonise their transport system. The initial introduction to each participant was facilitated by pre-existing professional contacts, after which subsequent participants were identified by snowballing (i.e. feedback from interview participants) in combination with criteria-specific identification (i.e. from a review of published local authority documentsThis 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...