Projects and cooperations

The aim of the “3EC – Empowering European Energy Consumers” project (03/2025-03/2028) is to support consumers in engaging in an active sustainability-oriented energy consumption – as envisaged by the EU and national legislators – by improving the current legal framework of the EU energy market. The project builds on the results of the EU Horizon 2020 project EC2 ec2project.eu - Energy Citizenship and Energy Communities for a Clean-Energy Transition (2021-2024) in which the 3EC research team participated. The 3EC team, consisting mainly of social psychologists and lawyers, will, first, develop a scientifically reliable and valid measure of active sustainability-oriented energy consumption (ASEC) behavior. Second, the team will supply research on the relationship between individual characteristics of consumers, contextual factors and ASEC behavior. In a next step, these variables will be used to classify consumers into different groups using a latent variable approach. Finally, the team will develop and test targeted strategies which better enable consumers to engage in an active sustainability-oriented energy consumption and which can be realized by changing and supplementing existing legal regulation of energy consumption. By doing so, the team will push the boundaries of sustainability oriented psychological research as well as the boundaries of traditional regulatory assumptions and techniques in targeting different groups of (energy) consumers. Principal investigator: Prof. Dr. Brigitta Lurger (University of Graz, Institute for Civil Law); lead of psychology team: Prof. Dr. Ursula Athenstaedt (University of Graz, Institute of Psychology).