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

A-Tier
Journal: Energy Economics
Year: 2010
Volume: 32
Issue: 1
Pages: 129-136

Authors (2)

Scarpa, Riccardo (Durham University) Willis, Ken (not in RePEc)

Score contribution per author:

2.011 = (α=2.01 / 2 authors) × 2.0x A-tier

α: calibrated so average coauthorship-adjusted count equals average raw count

Abstract

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.

Technical Details

RePEc Handle
repec:eee:eneeco:v:32:y:2010:i:1:p:129-136
Journal Field
Energy
Author Count
2
Added to Database
2026-01-29