Cheaper electricity or a better river? Estimating fluvial ecosystem value in Southern France

Anna Créti and Federico Pontoni ()
Additional contact information
Anna Créti: X-DEP-ECO - Département d'Économie de l'École Polytechnique - X - École polytechnique - IP Paris - Institut Polytechnique de Paris, LEDA-CGEMP - Centre de Géopolitique de l’Energie et des Matières Premières - LEDa - Laboratoire d'Economie de Dauphine - IRD - Institut de Recherche pour le Développement - Université Paris Dauphine-PSL - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: In the next years, France will renew a consistent share of hydroelectric concessions, among which we find those insisting on the Aspe and its tributaries (for a total of almost 100 MW). Beauty contests will take place, where bidders will present offers for technical and environmental improvements, as well as a revenue sharing percentage for Local Authorities. This framework generates a potential trade-off between revenue-sharing and environmental improvement. Our work investigates this trade-off by means of a discrete choice experiment (DCE) to estimate people's preferences. The experiment has been conducted on a representative sample living in the Aspe valley. In our DCE, we translate the revenue sharing in an immediate rebate in the electricity bill. Respondents could choose higher rebates and lower ecosystem improvements or lower (or no) rebate and higher ecosystem amelioration. According to the experiment results, the highest total willingness to pay (WTP) is above € 144 per household and per year. Moreover, people's marginal WTP for a satisfactory fish stock reaches 250 €/year, that is three times the maximum rebate that was offered. Finally, all environmental attributes are considered as significant and worth a monetary effort. Therefore, hydroelectric concession bidders should give clear priority to environmental aspects.

Keywords: Water Framework Directive; Choice Experiment; Hydropower (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-06-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm, nep-ene and nep-env
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-00998614v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-00998614v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-00998614

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().