Learning by Buying: Changes in Energy Literacy over Technology Ownership Duration

Additionally, previous studies focus on behaviours, such as technology adoption (Cha et al., 2024), at a single point in time. The implicit assumption in much of this work is that energy literacy precedes and drives behavioural outcomes such as technology adoption. However, this assumption remains largely untested.

It is equally plausible that the process of adopting and using energy technologies generates new knowledge and revises self-assessments, meaning that adoption itself could be a driver of both objective and perceived energy literacy. This paper examines how technology adoption (e.g., electric vehicles (EVs), photovoltaic systems (PVs), and heat pumps (HPs)), and crucially its duration, are associated with objective and perceived energy literacy and their calibration, which means whether people tend to under- or overestimate their knowledge.

Based on survey data, we explicitly introduce a time component to test whether literacy levels and calibration differ between adopters and nonadopters, with special focus on the role of ownership duration. We ask whether objective and perceived energy literacy change once a technology is adopted and analyse this change over time. Our findings suggest that the relationship between literacy and technology adoption is bidirectional and timedependent.

Importantly, the dynamics differ by technology, pointing to distinct informational trajectories following adoption.