Consumers’ willingness to pay for renewable energy: A meta-regression analysis

Chunbo Ma (), Abbie Rogers (), Marit Kragt, Fan Zhang, Maksym Polyakov, Fiona Gibson, Morteza Chalak, Ram Pandit and Sorada Tapsuwan

Resource and Energy Economics, 2015, vol. 42, issue C, 93-109

Abstract: Using renewable energy for domestic consumption has been identified as a key strategy by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Critical to the success of this strategy is to know whether consumers are willing to pay to increase the proportion of electricity generated from renewable energy in their electricity portfolio. There are a number of studies in the literature that report a wide range of willingness to pay estimates. In this study, we used a meta-regression analysis to determine how much of the variation in willingness to pay reflects true differences across the population and how much is due to study design, such as survey design and administration, and model specification. The results showed that factors that influence willingness to pay, such as renewable energy type, consumers’ socio-economic profile and consumers’ energy consumption patterns, explain less variation in willingness to pay estimates than the characteristics of the study design itself. Because of this effect, we recommend that policy makers exercise caution when interpreting and using willingness to pay results from primary studies. Our meta-regression analysis further shows that consumers have significantly higher willingness to pay for electricity generated from solar, wind or generic renewable energy source (i.e. not a specific source) than hydro power or biomass.

Keywords: Meta-regression; Renewable energy; Green electricity; Valuation; Willingness to pay (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C53 D62 Q40 Q48 Q51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (79)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0928765515000536
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Consumers’ Willingness to Pay for Renewable Energy: A Meta-Regression Analysis (2015)
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:resene:v:42:y:2015:i:c:p:93-109

DOI: 10.1016/j.reseneeco.2015.07.003

Access Statistics for this article

Resource and Energy Economics is currently edited by J. F. Shogren and S. Smulders

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