About the project

“THE RED THREAD THROUGH THE ENERGY TRANSITION”

ARIADNE is Germany’s main Kopernikus research project on climate and energy policy. It brings together a large consortium of institutes to design and test evidence-based strategies that can steer Germany to climate neutrality by 2045. From electricity and heating, to transport, industry, taxation, hydrogen, and governance. The project runs research, modeling, and citizen dialogue to make climate policy both effective and socially fair.

Our team contributes to ARIADNE with a special focus on the heating transition and household retrofits, understanding barriers, testing policies, and generating data that help decision-makers accelerate renovations while protecting households.

Are you writing a Bachelor’s or Master’s thesis on energy, climate policy, or household retrofits? You can apply to work with the student version of the ARIADNE dataset. The key information about available variables can be found here.

Our work zooms in on the optimal policies in buildings and heating sector. We are interested in:

  • Policy design: Smart carbon pricing, targeted transfers, and heating-ban policies that are politically feasible and fair.
  • Data for decisions: Repeated household panels on heating, bills, and past/planned retrofits, enabling robust, policy-relevant evaluation.
  • Behavior & barriers: Why households delay profitable retrofits; how information, norms, and audit quality shape decisions.

Prof. Dr. Andreas Gerster leads our empirical microeconomics work on energy and climate policy. His research spans household investment under policy uncertainty, energy labels & consumer decisions …

For more information check selected publications:

  • 1. Gessner, J., Gerster, A., and Kramm, M. (2025). The Alignment Effect of Auditing. CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series, 696.
  • 2. Gerster, A., Frondel, M., Kaestner, K., Pahle, M., and Singhal, P. (2025). Premium Programs for Energy Conservation: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Experiment. SSRN Working Paper, No. 5188361. DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.5188361.