Conclusions
Employing coarsened exact matching, we found that the German energy audit programme accelerated adoption of energy efficiency measures in small business organizations. While the few earlier studies evaluating the effects of energy audits on organizations’ adoption of energy efficient technologies rely on the subjective responses of participating organizations and do not employ control groups, our findings provide more robust evidence pertaining to the effectiveness of energy audits. The percentage increase in adoption in response to energy audits varied across the four types of ancillary measures analysed. The effect was strongest for insulation, i.e., the measure with the highest upfront costs, and for operations, arguably the most likely of the four measures to be overlooked by non-energy experts. Since these measures are related also to particularly high energy savings, our findings suggest that cost-efficient energy audits in small organizations should focus on—among the measures considered in this study—insulation measures and measures optimizing heating system operations. On the other hand, evaluations based on ‘the number of additional measures induced by an energy audit’ as an indicator of programme effectiveness (e.g., Fleiter et al., 2012b) could be misleading since, implicitly, they assume audits to be equally effective across measures. In general, for the four measures considered we find no strong evidence that detailed audits are more effective than simple audits. This result may be explained by the fact that these measures are relatively simple ancillary measures, which are typically identified and analysed in simple audits. For more complex core-production measures, we expect detailed audits to be more effective than simple audits.
