Willingness-to-pay for renewable energy: Primary and discretionary choice of British households' for micro-generation technologies

By Riccardo Scarpa, K. Willis. Energy Economics, 2010

514 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper documents the policy context of renewable energy production in the European Union. The research adopts a choice experiment approach to investigate households' WTP for these renewable energy technologies in the UK. The micro-generation technologies comprise solar photovoltaic, micro-wind, solar thermal, heat pumps, and biomass boilers and pellet stoves. The study compares the results from conditional and mixed logit models, which estimate the distribution of utility coefficients and then derives WTP values as a ratio of the attribute coefficient to the price coefficient, with a model in which the WTP distribution is estimated directly from utility in the money space. The results suggest that whilst renewable energy adoption is significantly valued by households, this value is not sufficiently large, for the vast majority of households, to cover the higher capital costs of micro-generation energy technologies.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bb614c9f495003331823341e938e632d23db6a38

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Citations in the corpus

Evaluating the public perceptions of nuclear power in China: Evidence from a contingent valuation survey (2014, background): “For instance, studies concerned with renewable energy (such as Abdullah and Jeanty, 2011; Scarpa and Willis, 2010; Kostakis and Sardianou, 2012) and climate change (such as Tseng and Chen, 2008; Solomon and Johnson, 2009).”
Consumers' preference for renewable energy in the southwest USA (2011, methodology): “According 3 Alternatively, in order to analyze the willingness to pay for renewable energy, Scarpa and Willis (2010) implemented choice experiments in England, Wales and Scotland, and Roe et al. (2001) conducted a hedonic analysis in the US.”
The diffusion of microgeneration technologies – assessing the influence of perceived product characteristics on home owners' willingness to pay (2011, background): “In a choice experiment, Scarpa and Willis (2010) investigated households’ WTP for microgeneration technologies (i.e. solar PV, micro wind, solar thermal, heat pumps, biomass boilers and pellet stoves) in the UK.”
Energy Efficiency Investments in the Home: Swiss Homeowners and Expectations about Future Energy Prices (2013, background): “Scarpa and Willis (2009) find that the WTP for so-called “micro-generation” technologies (e.”
Trust, awareness, and independence: Insights from a socio-psychological factor analysis of citizen knowledge and participation in community energy systems (2018, background): “In the energy domain, literature to date that focusses on willingness, ranges from willingness to pay, willingness to accept, willingness to participate and willingness to adopt [2,10,21,30,31].”
Combining Policies for Renewable Energy: Is the Whole Less than the Sum of its Parts? (2010, background): “12 The United Kingdom plans to implement its feed-in tariffs by mid 2010, but Scarpa and Willis (2009) note that some utilities have voluntarily offered the feed-in tariff rates as early as May 2009.”
Are consumers willing to pay more for electricity from cooperatives? Results from an online Choice Experiment in Germany (2014, background): “…that much recent research on consumer electricity preferences has focused on WTP for renewable energy (e.g. Roe et al. 2001; Borchers et al. 2007; Scarpa and Willis 2010; Álvarez-Farizo and Hanley 2002; Dimitropoulos and Kontoleon 2009; Meyerhoff et al. 2010; (Michelsen and Madlener 2012)).”
Understanding the uneven diffusion of building-scale renewable energy systems: A review of household, local and country level factors in diverse European countries (2017, background): “Installers are often the main source of information for building owners, and their recommendations have significant weight in the choice of several building systems or components [30,39,89,90].”
Adoption of renewable heating systems: An empirical test of the diffusion of innovation theory (2017, result): “Our results show the importance of investment and operating costs and are consistent with the findings of earlier studies [12], [13], [15], [83], [84], that have emphasized the relevance of economic factors in the choice of heating system and microgeneration technology.”