DECOMPOSING CONSUMER WILLINGNESS-TO-PAY FOR RENEWABLE ENERGY IN TRANSPORT INTO VALUES FOR EMISSIONS REDUCTIONS AND ENERGY TYPES

摘要

Governments worldwide express the desire to move away from conventional energy use towards the use of renewable energy. Without government intervention, this energy transition is not brought about by energy markets because of the higher costs of renewable energy. An extensive literature has emerged addressing the question how much consumers are willing to pay for renewable energy, with a particular focus on (renewable) electricity markets (Sundt and Rehdzan, 2015). These studies typically apply stated-preference methods and estimate how much consumers are willing to pay extra for renewable energy on top of their current periodical energy bill or per unit of renewable energy. However, while different renewable energy types share the fact that they emit less greenhouse gas emissions compared to conventional energy types, they vary in other aspects such as the type of energy carrier (e.g. molecular or electrical). These different energy characteristics may distort the estimation of the willingness-to-pay (WTP) for renewable energy if one is primarily interested in the WTP for emission reduction, which is the ultimate goal of the energy transition. In addition, this distinction matters for the design of effective renewable energy policies. Depending on preferences (and also energy prices), it may be more cost-effective for governments to promote strongly preferred types of renewable energy. This project decomposes the willingness-to-pay of consumers for renewable energy into components for greenhouse gas emissions and energy types. In addition, we investigate how the WTP is related to the characteristics of consumers. We apply an internet-based choice-experiment to the passenger-car market. The passenger-car market is suitable for the decomposition of the WTP as consumers in these market are facing many options regarding the fuel type of their new car, including various fuel types based on renewable energy (e.g. renewable compressed natural gas (CNG), hydrogen, electricity). We apply stated-preference methods as a choice-experiment enables including several fuel types for which markets are currently almost non-existent (e.g. hydrogen passenger cars), hindering the use of revealed-preference methods. Our sample consists of two different surveys which is sent out to participants in five different European countries. Participants are selected to represent the adult population in each country. By collecting data from five different European countries we can also explore international differences in the WTP. The first survey was sent out to 2000 participants in Austria, Germany, Italy and Switzerland (evenly distributed over countries) via French conductor Efficience 3. The second survey was sent out to 1750 participants of the LISS panel of CentERdata (University of Tilburg) in The Netherlands. Jointly, the surveys result in a total number of observations of 56,250. Both surveys were sent out in the fourth quarter of 2017. The results from Efficience 3 are already obtained and the results from CentERdata will be obtained by the end of January 2018. Once the data from CenterData is collected we will conduct the data analysis and finalize a first draft of the paper.