The changing effectiveness of financial incentives: Theory and evidence from residential solar rebate programs in California

Bixuan Sun and Ashwini Sankar

Energy Policy, 2022, vol. 162, issue C

Abstract: Financial incentives, such as rebate programs, are widely used to promote the adoption of residential solar photovoltaic systems. This paper studies the changing effectiveness of rebate programs as the solar market evolves. We develop a theoretical model to first characterize individual treatment effects then aggregate them to regional effect, and hypothesize that the aggregate treatment effect of rebates first increases and then decreases with declining costs and increasing net metering rate. We empirically test our hypotheses by estimating the treatment effect of rebate rate in California from 2006 to 2017 and its interaction terms with installation cost and residential electricity rate. Results confirm our hypotheses and identify an installation cost of $8.84/W and a residential electricity rate of 22.36c/kWh as the turning points where rebate impacts start to decline. Our findings suggest that front-loaded rebate rate design can be an effective and efficient tool at promoting residential solar adoption.

Keywords: Solar PV; Financial incentives; Rebate programs; Program impact (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421522000295
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:enepol:v:162:y:2022:i:c:s0301421522000295

DOI: 10.1016/j.enpol.2022.112804

Access Statistics for this article

Energy Policy is currently edited by N. France

More articles in Energy Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().