The university's Centre for Sustainability has been awarded more than $3 million over four years to investigate energy efficiency in New Zealand's transport sector as well as for small businesses and in homes.
The project was one of three at Otago University allocated funding from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment as part of its 2012 science investment round.
Sustainability centre director Dr Janet Stephenson and consumer psychologist Prof Rob Lawson will lead the research project. They aim to determine how an energy efficient transport sector can be created and invested in by New Zealanders.
Research would focus on the future of transport, which new technologies were becoming available and what new fuels were likely to emerge, Dr Stephenson said.
How markets could be encouraged to deliver energy efficient practices, and consumers to adopt them, would also be a key part of the project.
It would expand to include the potential use of such technology by businesses and households.
Research would then look at how the transition to using energy efficient technologies could be made smoothly.
The project had an initial four years of funding, including a grant from the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA) for national household transport surveys, and money from Z Energy for research on fuel consumers.
It would involve researchers from many disciplines at Otago, as well as additional expertise from Waikato University and two specialist consultancy firms.
International collaborators include Oxford and Durham Universities in England, and universities in Sweden, Australia and America.
The project followed the sustainability centre's three-year culture project which looked at energy efficiency in homes and the barriers to uptake of efficiency measures, Dr Stephenson said.
"We created a framework for that project which involved looking at the interactions between the energy technologies in people's homes, their energy practices, and their beliefs and understandings. The results have given us lots of insights into what prompts behaviour change, and we've been able to suggest practical solutions to overcoming barriers and improving our homes as a result," she said.
The new project team would apply the framework to small businesses and transport.
"There are huge cost savings and productivity gains to be made. We hope that our work will support a faster and more effective uptake of energy efficiency in all these areas," she said.
The other recipients of the funding round were a project led by the university's Wellington campus focused on finding the best development path for New Zealand's cities, which received $9 million, and a project which will investigate adding novel carbohydrates (oligosaccharides) to infant formula, which received $789,900.
