State and local attitudes toward household electrification in California: evidence from a large survey

Gabriel De Roche, Sophia Tomany de Brito, Yohan Min, Sanjay Poudel, Madalsa Singh, Patricia Hidalgo-Gonzalez, Ranjit Deshmukh, Grace C. Wu and Matto Mildenberger
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Gabriel De Roche: University of California, San Diego

No zjcw2_v1, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Decarbonizing residential energy depends on millions of households making millions of purchasing decisions across multiple household electrification technologies, especially solar and storage systems, electric vehicles, heat pumps, and induction stoves. This paper describes consumer attitudes towards household electrification using a large representative survey of 7,158 households in California, with data collected in Spring 2025 from a stratified sample that includes large subgroups across all of California's climate zones as well as from census tracts designated as Disadvantaged Communities by the state. Alongside a wide range of sociodemographic and attitudinal predictors of current adoption, we measure future adoption interest with a personalized contingent-valuation measure of the minimum financial incentive/subsidy required to adopt along a technology-specific subsidy ladder. Leveraging the large statewide sample size, we also use multilevel regression with post-stratification (MRP) to estimate future adoption rates for each of California's 9,129 census tracts for every threshold along this subsidy ladder. We find substantial latent demand, especially for technologies with low current adoption. We also find heterogeneity across technologies in consumers' sensitivity to subsidies and that attitudinal predictors (and especially beliefs about cost, health, and safety benefits) dominate sociodemographic predictors. These results have direct implications for active policy design. Information campaigns designed to shift beliefs about health and safety play an important complementary role alongside cost-focused messages. Our geographically fine-grained estimates of future adoption at the census tract level provide rich local data for policy-makers, researchers, and practitioners designing incentive programs and planning grid infrastructure as California households continue to electrify.

Date: 2026-08-04
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:zjcw2_v1

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/zjcw2_v1

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