Sarah Darby is a world-renowned researcher of social and behavioural aspects of energy use. She holds a three-year ESRC/RCUK interdisciplinary fellowship, to work on domestic energy feedback (displays, billing and smart metering issues). She is part of the external evaluation team for the UK Demand Reduction Pilot, a programme of trials of different types of feedback carried out by four major energy suppliers and co-funded by the government.
Sarah gained a BSc in Ecological Science from Edinburgh University. Her D.Phil degree was awarded by the University of Oxford for a thesis on ‘Awareness, action and feedback in domestic energy use’, in which learning theory was used to develop a picture of how householders learn about their energy use and possibilities for change. Most of her research work has involved the study of energy in buildings, and she was a co-author of 40% House, a widely-debated major study of the prospects for reducing carbon emissions from the UK housing stock. Her reviews of the energy feedback literature have been widely cited, and she now writes and speaks on a range of issues relating to socio-technical energy systems, equity issues, energy education (in the broad sense) and utility-customer relations.
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