Planning for an all-electric retirement?

When we conduct behavioural demographics analyses for councils, a key audience we seek to identify is older Australians (usually classed as 65 and older).

The plan is to develop projects that encourage a shift to renewables-based, all-electric homes in a way that meets the needs of these households, understanding that they are likely to be home more during the day (great for solar), are usually sensitive to energy costs due to restricted incomes and may be outright homeowners.

But maybe the audience we should be looking at is pre-retirement homeowners, aged 55-65 (hat tip to Dan Cowdell and Geelong Sustainability for picking this up in their projects).

This is an audience who may be at their income-earning peak and near to or have completed paying off their mortgage – a unique combination of being both income and capital-rich. They are also actively thinking about and planning for retirement, such as banking supernnaution and have the capacity to invest in energy efficient and renewable technologies.

Project designers need to think about how these households can be recruited (e.g. not running workshops during the working week) and the communications required (e.g. emphasising being in control of inevitable change) to encourage and support them to change behaviour.

It's a potentially ideal audience for the shift to all-electric homes but think carefully about their motivations and what messaging they will respond to.

What do you think would work?