Large scale energy efficient renovation of buildings is one of the most important tools to realize the society's need of a more sustainable building stock. Most Norwegians own their own homes. Therefore private homeowners are a focus group for the government urging to accelerate the dwelling energy efficiency rates. Success factors were identified in the in-depth study of the decision process of eleven homeowners. Large differences in energy use due to the building's condition and the occupants' behavior was encountered in the sample. Only homeowners who were conscious consumers and did not trust expert advice or that had special knowledge due to their professions succeeded in realizing energy efficiency by renovation. Lack of knowledge, bad advice from craftsmen or priority to work that they can do themselves stopped other homeowners from implementing energy efficiency.Increased knowledge on all the gains from energy efficiency, the availability of attractive products and services as well as easy access to reliable advice on the better renovation solutions have a large potential to get more homeowners to make energy 1 efficient choices in the process of renovation. Coordination of more of policy strategies including specific information and incentives are needed to facilitate this.

This chapter gives an overview of research that describes user experiences with different types of energy-efficient buildings, focusing on indoor climate, technical operation, user attitudes and general satisfaction. Energy-efficient buildings are often rated better than conventional buildings on indoor climate, but on digging deeper, users have different concerns. The varying results from the user evaluations reflect that the quality of buildings differs. However, the complaints may also be a result of inappropriate use. The main aim of this chapter is to give guidelines for further research, based on existing user evaluations of energyefficient buildings. Three important areas for further research on user evaluations could be identified. First, there is a shortage of research that takes into account the social context for evaluation; the social environment, the process of moving into an energy-efficient building and prior knowledge of environmental issues influence evaluation of the buildings. Energy-efficient buildings may also require specific architectural solutions and further research should consider architectural and aesthetic aspects in the evaluation. Research on the use and operation of energy-efficient buildings is increasing, but there is still a need to give more detailed attention to different ways of providing information and training in operation and use.

This paper serves as an introduction to a special issue on smart grids and the social sciences. There is currently a discourse of very high ambitions and anticipation regarding how the implementation of a broad collection of smart grid related technologies across scales and geographies would influence the performance of electricity grids, and through this play an essential role in energy transition processes, renewable energy implementation, de-carbonization etc. So far, the question of how to achieve the desired goals has largely been a technical endeavor. In this special issue, and in this paper, we explore some of the ways through which social scientists have begun to engage the smart grid development. Here, research mainly targets three distinct areas of scientific research. First, emerging infrastructures attract a large number of imaginaries or visions, which can be studied. Second, smart grids have explicit expectations towards its users inscribed in them. The second group of contributions gathered here traces these types of inscriptions and the various relationships that might emerge between new technologies and publics at different scales. Third, infrastructures are large socio-technical systems that have to be built. Studies of this kind of system building and transformation are collected in the third part of this issue. This special issue and paper is partly based on a workshop on smart grids and social sciences, kindly funded by the Centre for Sustainable Energy Studies (CenSES) and the Norwegian Research centre for Zero Emission Buildings (ZEB), hosted at NTNU in Trondheim, 2014. We are grateful for the work of four anonymous peers who provided valuable comments to an earlier draft, and for all the help we have received from editor in chief, Benjamin Sovacool, in the process of compiling this special issue.2

Improving energy efficiency in dwellings is generally seen as the low-hanging fruit of climate change mitigation. In particular decreased heat loss through better insulation is suggested as one of the most cost-effective means to achieve the ambitious national and international goals of climate gas reduction. However, the literature shows that a profitable technological solution is not sufficient to reach the energy goals. Aspects such as a lack of information, unobserved costs, and heterogeneity among users can compromise the success of technical innovation. Still, there are successful concepts that drive the technological development in the construction sector. The Passive House is an example for such innovations that manage to bridge the energy efficiency gap. This paper addresses the Passive House concept and standard as a success story of technological innovation. With Bruno Latour's Science in Action (1987) as a starting point, we describe the conditions under which the standard was created, the role of the network built around the Passive House Institute, and the consequences of exporting the standard. We identify success factors that have supported the diffusion of the Passive House standard and concept and discuss its possible development in the current situation which is characterized by its wide-spread adoption.

Globally, buildings are considerable energy users. Stricter regulations and instruments such as energy performance standards aim at raising energy performance ambitions and reducing energy use. They rely on the implementation and use of efficient technologies, but technical efficiency improvements do not guarantee low consumption. A gap between estimated and actual building energy performance represents a common challenge.Over the building lifecycle, multiple professionals influence energy performance levels: architects, engineers, contractors and facilities managers, but also building users. This article concentrates on the building use phase, and how building managers and end-users contribute to increasing or reducing the energy performance gap.Capturing the relations between formal standards, technologies and actual professional work requires interdisciplinary research. Taking professional practices as the starting point, the article draws on facility management and social practice theory, and case studies mapping energy management and use practices in buildings with high performance ambitions in Norway, informed by interviews with owner, facilities management and user representatives. This article presents and compares results from two office buildings. It demonstrates and discusses how characteristics of and relationships between professional practices and standards influence the realisation of ambitions, pointing out opportunities for actually achieving and sustaining the targeted energy performance levels.