Work Package 3: Characteristics of PV adoption
Description
In WP3, preferences of Austrian households regarding adoption and utilization of PV panels will be elicited in a survey-based experimental design. The WP strives to understand the specific motives behind the residential PV adoption in Austria. Several possible sources might be at place for the residential PV (non-)adoption, the motives behind such decisions might have economic/financial, environmental, behavioural or technical explanations. Understanding the exact drivers of and barriers to PV adoption is essential for designing the right policy instruments and incentive schemes to accelerate investment in residential renewable energy technologies. Methodologically, however, it is challenging to establish causal links on the residential PV adoption and the motives behind it as well as linking adoption decisions to post-adoption outcomes (such as changes observed in residential electricity consumption upon installing a PV system).
In WP3, a survey-based choice experiment will be designed. With the help of an external service provider on programming and hosting, the survey-based experiment will be implemented online using a sample of participants that are representative for the population of Austria by gender, federal-state, age, income. While the survey questionnaire part consists of screening questions (e.g. making distinctions between PV adopters and non-adopters as well as differentiating cases for homeowners and tenants) and questions on households' socio-demographic characteristics, the experimental part will explicitly focus on eliciting preferences on specific attributes for PV adoption. In different hypothetical PV adoption scenarios, participants will be asked to indicate their preferences. Using choice-experimental methods (e.g. binary, multi-choice, Multiple price list (MPL)), WP3 quantifies the Willingness-to-Pay (WTP) for different decision attributes for residential PV adoption. The results will serve as input for the diffusion modelling in WP4.
