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Renewable energy sources and smart devices are options for those wishing to lessen their reliance on fossil fuels. Smart devices in the home also allow energy providers to remotely control energy use (RCEU). However, little is understood about consumer’s perceptions of RCEU programs. Based on the theory of planned behavior (TPB), it is proposed that environmental attitudes, environmental self-identity, green history, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control will predict differences in both purchase intentions and RCEU.

Data from 692 participants was collected via an online survey of energy consumers. The relationship between study variables was examined using regression analyses.

The results indicate that environmental attitude, environmental identity, green history and perceived behavioral control are positively related to both purchase intentions and RCEU. The results could have important implications for energy providers, practitioners, energy consumers and citizens interested in environmental issues.

As energy providers consider ways to better manage consumer energy use, RCEU has been used more frequently. However, understanding customer perceptions of RCEU is not well-established in the green energy literature. This paper contributes a first step towards the understanding of RCEU perceptions.

This paper aims to extend the small body of literature on energy industry transitions on firm level. A growing number of articles shed light on paradigm shifts in the energy industry and the influence of renewable energies on industry structures. In the majority of cases, the authors analyze changes on a global or national level.

Energy companies’ forecasting capabilities are particularly important to enable them to react in time to upcoming changes in industry structures. In this context, we analyze annual reports of German energy companies to evaluate their economic and technological forecasting competencies.

Big energy providers offer high economic forecasting quality, but seem to be less able to derive valid forecasts in terms of renewable energies from the currently unstable political frameworks. On the contrary, renewable energy companies do not seem to suffer from these difficulties and provide good foresting accuracy in terms of renewable energy development, but show less accurate economic forecasting quality.

Big energy providers need to find the means of responding to the challenges and integrate changing political guidelines and support into their forecasting system. Renewable energy companies, in contrast, should focus on company-level profitability and the respective economic forecasting competencies.

This paper makes a significant contribution to the literature on the subject of energy industry transitions by providing insights from publicly available data on firm level. The findings are highly relevant for managers of the energy industry and policy makers in this field.

Service modularity promotes efficiency at the provider end of the supply chain and customisation at the customer end. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how logistics service modularity contributes to sustainable development through the means of energy efficiency. This is analysed in the context of logistics services for household waste collection.

A single case study methodology with embedded units is adopted where semi-structured interviews were conducted with a waste service provider (WSP) and buyers (municipalities) in Sweden, focussing on five types of logistics services for waste collection: collection of food and residual waste at apartments and one-family houses, as well as collection of gardening waste. Service modules are identified and analysed by blueprinting the service.

The findings show different service modules – standardised or customised – and their contribution to sustainable development operationalised through energy efficiency. Principles for an energy-centric service design are proposed.

The research is limited to Swedish household waste collection setting. Promising efficiency through standardisation, logistics service modularity has a potential to improve energy efficiency as well. This neglected link between sustainability and service modularity offers fruitful research avenues.

This research is of practical relevance to waste logistics service providers and the municipality by suggesting principles for energy-centric service design. The service blueprint enables using logistics service modularity for improving energy efficiency in different logistics service settings.

This research incorporates an environmentally sustainable development perspective into logistics service modularity and contributes to the literature by exploring how energy efficiency is improved by modular design of logistics services. Furthermore, the study is one of the first to use service blueprinting to analyse logistics service modularity, providing a methodological contribution to that field in general and logistics in particular.

The purpose of this study is to examine private households’ preferences for service bundles in the German energy market.

This investigation is based on survey data collected from 3,663 customers of seven mainly municipal energy suppliers in the German energy market. The data set was analyzed via a binary logistic regression model to identify the most prospective customers and their preferences regarding bundles of energy services.

The results indicate that potential adopters of energy-related service bundles have greater prior knowledge about service bundles; place higher importance on simplified handling, flat rates and long price guarantees; prefer to purchase a service bundle from an energy supplier; live in urban areas and have a gas tariff; are both less likely to have a green electricity tariff and to support the German energy transition; have a greater intention to purchase a smart home product; are less likely to already be prosumers; and prefer customer centers and social media as communication channels with energy providers.

This paper offers several implications for decision-makers in developing marketing strategies for bundled offerings in a highly competitive energy market.

This paper contributes to the sparse research on service bundles in the energy sector, despite the growing interest of energy suppliers and consumers in this topic. It expands the research focusing on the telecommunications sector.

The advent of retail deregulation (liberalisation) in the United States electricity markets provides the major energy users, for the first time, significant choice in energy procurement. With choice comes responsibility for sorting the wide range of potential services, associated risks and variables in price. As deregulation has progressed, the emerging market has not yet reached maturity for retail customers, resulting in significant price volatility and imbalances in supply in some regions. This paper, presented in the Journal in two parts, of which this is the second, explains the fundamentals of energy choice for commercial and industrial energy users and the criteria to be considered in making long‐term energy commitments.

Clean and sustainable energy becomes an alternative to differentiate electricity suppliers, but it is necessary to have a better understanding of their behaviour to achieve green customer loyalty. This paper aims to deploy a behavioural model that helps explain loyalty of customers towards green electricity providers by including a series of antecedents such as trust, satisfaction, perceived environmental impact, propensity to trust and perceived risk.

The paper deploys a behavioural model that it is tested through structural equation modelling to a sample of 231 German electricity consumers with green contracts. The data analysis included two steps: first, the development and validation of the scales used to measure the constructs proposed in the model, and second, the model test.

Results demonstrate that trust and satisfaction directly influence loyalty, while satisfaction and the other variables included in the model have an indirect relationship with loyalty mediated by trust and satisfaction. As green characteristics of electricity are difficult to evaluate, managers should demonstrate in their communication the environmental effects of their activities while emphasising their capacity to attend to supply requirements for building long-term customer relationships.

The paper is focused on the understanding of those consumers who have signed a green electricity contract and the antecedents associated to their loyalty. The behavioural model helps identify how managers should apply marketing strategies to foster green consumers loyalty.

Purpose – The UK energy market is in a period of significant transition, with a target of cutting carbon emissions by at least 80% by 2050. There is widespread agreement that the current policy landscape needs to change if this ambitious target is to be achieved. However, the current business structure also requires a radical overhaul. This chapter explores the new business models that are being introduced to serve commercial and domestic customers.

Methodology/approach – This chapter presents a case study of the UK energy sector that draws on the first author's active engagement in the UK's energy market and thus participant observation. The discussion is framed around relevant material from the entrepreneurship and innovation literatures, with a particular focus on entrepreneurial opportunities created by policy.

Findings – In a rapidly changing policy environment, new ideas, technologies and business models are emerging. A range of new business models evident in the market are explored. These include new forms of service delivery, market-making models and finance models.

Social implications – The chapter highlights the importance of entrepreneurship and innovation in the delivery of a low-carbon economy. It also explores the role of policymakers in promoting more environmentally sustainable approaches in this industry sector.

Originality/value of chapter – The chapter presents a novel, industry-specific case study. It contributes to extant knowledge on sustainable business through its focus on the complex interaction of policy and entrepreneurship as well as some of the business models required for the transition to a low-carbon future.

As one of the most energy-intensive sectors, the manufacturing industry is strongly affected by current economic, ecological and political issues and is increasingly looking to reduce its energy consumption through effective management. One important component of energy management is monitoring, which can be improved by using the Internet of Things (IoT). This study aims to identify the factors behind the adoption of IoT energy monitoring systems in manufacturing industries and IoT’s impact on consumption in this context. Moreover, this study explores what constitutes successful implementation and develops recommendations on how companies can best use the generated energy-saving potential.

For this purpose, an exploratory, inductive research approach is taken in which five semi-structured interviews with IoT energy-monitoring platform providers located in Germany are conducted and additional documents about these platforms are analysed.

Based on these interviews and documents, this study defines the relevant factors involved in the increased adoption of IoT energy monitoring systems as desired cost reduction, regulatory requirements and customer expectations. Once implemented, a company’s energy efficiency potential strongly depends on its individual situation; however, the transparency characteristic of IoT supports managers in deriving effective energy-saving measures. Additionally, the used efficiency potential is influenced by the level of data collection and organisational capabilities.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, as the first study, this research combines findings from the energy management and IoT research streams and places them into an organisational context. The application of the fit-viability model as an overarching framework enhances the theoretical contributions of this study. Moreover, focusing on Germany and its substantial industrial sector enables the gathering of important insights and the analysis of the specific use case of industrial IoT, which yields new findings for practitioners as well.

This paper aims to explore the concept of “actor engagement” within the context of the sharing economy, a novel and dynamic business model. Specifically, it investigates the formation of actor engagement and its relationship with value creation within this business model.

Drawing on Storbacka et al. (2016)actor engagement framework and service-dominant logic service ecosystem model, unstructured data (text and images) from the Airbnb platform in seven countries and text- and image-mining techniques such as machine learning are used to measure the research variables and test the model by PLS-SEM.

The results indicate that affective engagement has a more significant impact on behavioural engagement than cognitive engagement for multidimensional actor engagement. Service providers’ engagement – directly, and through customer engagement – influences value creation for service providers (i.e. performance). Moreover, national-level moderator (i.e. economic, competitiveness, technology, social and political factors) plays a significant moderating role in our model.

This study encourages future research to explore how actor engagement leads to value creation for all actors on the different sharing economy platforms.

The findings provide practical insights for service providers to engage their customers and platform managers, especially in an international context, on managing their relationships with both customers and service providers in different countries.

This study advances the current literature on actor engagement and its role in value creation by providing a better understanding of the role of the national context in this process through unstructured data analysis.

This chapter from a brief review of the relevant literature on the energy markets points out the changes in the relationships between energy companies and customers through the Web. The objective is to highlight the changes of the energy markets thanks to the web demonstrating that it is able to ensure the raising of the switching rates and hence the competition, goal of the liberalization of public services. To this end, the authors will use secondary data from Accenture researches about the perceptions of customers and energy companies around the relations established via the web, and the CUAC for the switching mode performed in the State of Victoria in Australia.