Large organizations wield considerable market power, their procurement activities can be leveraged to achieve social, economic and environmental goals by ‘pulling’ more desirable products into the market. However, while there is substantial research in individual consumer buying behavior and market barriers to sustainable technology adoption, less is known about large organizational buying behavior and the impact of institutional barriers in this area. To address these research gaps, we conducted an exploratory study aimed at better understanding the process through which large organizations purchase sustainable energy technologies and what internal barriers they experience during that process. We surveyed and interviewed 120 individuals involved in procurement from Californian organizations representing both public and private sectors. Survey results indicate the need to resolve the conflict between prioritizing lowest first cost and lowest life cycle cost, better engage multiple stakeholders involved in internal decision-making around purchasing, and improve existing procurement tools or offer new ones. We provide recommendations for how policymakers can apply our findings to increase the adoption of sustainable energy technologies in their own organizations and communities.

There are many national policies aimed at driving an increase in energy efficiency (EE) implementation. But how effective are they? Over the past 20 years, the U.S. government has established five legal authorities mandating federal agencies to prioritize energy-efficient products when purchasing. As the largest single buyer of energy-consuming products, energy-efficient purchasing across the federal sector would result in huge energy savings and emissions reductions. Despite this, our research has found that only ~55% of federal purchases currently meet existing requirements. If national mandates are not enough to ensure that federal agencies are buying efficient products, what is? To answer this question, we surveyed 161 procurement and sustainability staff from 26 different federal agencies. Findings revealed that several institutional factors (i.e., the roles, rules, and tools within an organization) play a key role in determining how likely federal buyers are to prioritize EE. Ensuring that federal agencies comply with existing EE requirements is foundational to achieving a clean energy future. This will require more than national mandates, but also the design of policies that successfully identify and address the institutional factors that must be changed in order to increase EE implementation. This paper presents an overview of the data collection and analysis methods for our study, as well as key survey findings and the insights they offer for overcoming institutional barriers to compliance with existing EE requirements. We conclude by discussing how these strategies can be broadly applied to improve the design of EE policies in the U.S. and beyond.

Currently, five legal authorities require U.S. federal agencies to purchase energy-efficient products. However, compliance with these requirements has consistently been low (~55%). Recent surveys indicate that energy efficiency requirements are not communicated properly within federal agencies and energy-efficiency is not a top priority. In the constantly evolving energy industry, with many solutions for a clean energy future, effective communication methods are vital for widespread adoption of energy efficiency. We have been conducting experiments within the U.S. federal sector that test the effectiveness of messaging strategies developed by using behavioral science principles like loss aversion, framing, and herd behavior. This will identify effective communications methods that encourage energy efficiency adoption. In this study, we measure the effectiveness of different communication strategies by monitoring the web traffic of hyperlinks placed within our digital communications and outreach materials. To determine effective strategies that influence federal buyer behavior, the web traffic from subjects that received the behavioral science-based messaging (treatment group) is compared to that from subjects that received regular messaging (control group) for each of the strategies. This paper provides an overview of the behavioral science principles that we applied, data collection methods, and results of our analysis. Since the lack of effective communication of energy-efficiency policies is also a common problem in the private sector, the messaging strategies developed in this study can be applicable to other large private sector institutions