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Despite large amounts of available roof space, long pay-back periods for investments in photovoltaic (PV) power plants often hinder PV installations in industrial parks. Photovoltaic citizen participation initiatives (PV-CPI) are an alternative way of financing PV power plants that add non-financial benefits to these investments. This paper analyzed the feasibility of the installation of PV power plants focused on high rates of self-consumption financed by citizen participation initiatives on the roofs of five companies located in the Austrian Ennshafen industrial business park based on the net present value and the discounted pay-back period and compared it to a standard financing scheme, assuming a predetermined interest rate for participants as well as economies of scale with respect to the specific installation costs due to a joint purchase of the PV power plants. To calculate the feasibility, site-specific data and literature input have been used. The results show that despite an interest rate above the current interest rates of conservative forms of investments provided to (small-scale) investors, a payback-period of 17–23 years can be reached while the joint purchase can lead to a competitive feasibility of the PV-CPI compared to an individual purchase of PV power plants.

Growing self-generation and storage are expected to cause significant changes in residential electricity utilization patterns. Commonly applied volumetric network tariffs may induce imbalance between different groups of households and their respective contribution to recovering the operating costs of the grid. Understanding consumer behaviour and appliance usage together with socio-economic factors can help regulatory authorities to adapt network tariffs to new circumstances in a fair way. Here, we assess the effects of 11 network tariff scenarios on household budgets using real load profiles from 765 households. Thus we explore the possibly disruptive impact of applying peak-load-based tariffs on the budgets of households when they have been mainly charged for consumed volumes before. Our analysis estimates the change in household network expenditure for different combinations of energy, peak and fixed charges, and can help to design tariffs that recover the costs needed for the sustainable operation of the grid. Home energy generation and storage are expected to alter residential energy usage. Careful tariff design is thus needed to ensure fair distribution of grid operation costs. Using smart-meter data and socio-economic profiles, this study explores the potential impact of different tariffs on household expenditure.

Economists argue that such market-based policy instruments as environmental taxes and emission trading systems are the best way to target the negative effects of pollution. Yet there is no agreement about whether the use of these instruments is sufficient, whether they are deployed efficiently, and which factors influence their effectiveness. Nor is it clear if such policies have had any significant effect on the urgent matter of climate change mitigation. This volume offers conceptual, empirical, and theoretical analyses of the effectiveness of these policy instruments in achieving environmental goals. Taken together, the chapters not only identify shortcomings of existing policy making, but also point to ways in which more effective policy design can help solve one of the most pressing problems of our time. The contributors consider such topics as theoretical approaches to address the failure of the free market to protect the environment, the influence of people's trust in their government on their willingness to accept higher environmental taxes, political determinants of fossil fuel pricing, a game theoretic approach to understanding domestic political constraints on international environmental agreements, and intergenerational equity and carbon taxation.ContributorsElisa Belfiori, Frank J. Convery, Peter Egger, Denny Ellerman, Dominic Hauck, Philipp Hieronymi, Andrea Kollmann, Sonja Köke, Andreas Lange, Antony Millner, Francesco Nicolli, Sergey Nigai, Johannes Reichl, David Schüller, Jon Strand, Cees van Beers, Francesco Vona

Economists argue that such market-based policy instruments as environmental taxes and emission trading systems are the best way to target the negative effects of pollution. Yet there is no agreement about whether the use of these instruments is sufficient, whether they are deployed efficiently, and which factors influence their effectiveness. Nor is it clear if such policies have had any significant effect on the urgent matter of climate change mitigation. This volume offers conceptual, empirical, and theoretical analyses of the effectiveness of these policy instruments in achieving environmental goals. Taken together, the chapters not only identify shortcomings of existing policy making, but also point to ways in which more effective policy design can help solve one of the most pressing problems of our time. - The contributors consider such topics as theoretical approaches to address the failure of the free market to protect the environment, the influence of people’s trust in their government on their willingness to accept higher environmental taxes, political determinants of fossil fuel pricing, a game theoretic approach to understanding domestic political constraints on international environmental agreements, and intergenerational equity and carbon taxation.

As a part of the framework of the EU-funded Energy efficiency through Behavior CHANge Transition (ENCHANT) project, the present paper intends to provide a \"Research Protocol\" of a web-based trial to: (i) assess the effectiveness of behavioral intervention strategies--either single or in combination--on electricity saving, and (ii) unravel the psychological factors contributing to intervention effectiveness in households across Europe. Six distinct interventions (i.e., information provision, collective vs. individual message framing, social norms, consumption feedback, competitive elements, and commitment strategies) targeting electricity saving in households from six European countries (i.e., Austria, Germany, Italy, Norway, Romania, and Türkiye) are evaluated, with an initial expected samples of about 1500 households per country randomly assigned to 12 intervention groups and two control groups, and data is collected through an ad-hoc online platform. The primary outcome is the weekly electricity consumption normalized to the last seven days before measurement per person per household. Secondary outcomes are the peak consumption during the last day before measurement and the self-reported implementation of electricity saving behaviors (e.g., deicing the refrigerator). The underlying psychological factors expected to mediate and/or moderate the intervention effects on these outcomes are intentions to save electricity, perceived difficulty of saving energy, attitudes to electricity saving, electricity saving habit strength, social norms to save electricity, personal norms, collective efficacy, emotional reaction to electricity consumption, and national identity. The intervention effectiveness will be evaluated by comparing psychological factors and consumption variables before and after the intervention, leading to a 14 (groups including 2 control groups) × 6 (time) mixed factorial design, with one factor between (group) and one factor within subjects (time)-6 measurements of the psychological factors and 6 readings of the electricity meters, which gives then 5 weeks of electricity consumption. Data collection for the present RCT started in January 2023, and by October 2023 data collection will conclude. Upon establishing feasibility and effectiveness, the outcomes of this study will assist policymakers, municipalities, NGOs, and other communal entities in identifying impactful interventions tailored to their unique circumstances and available resources. Researchers will benefit from a flexible, structured tool that allows the design, implementation and monitoring of complex interventions protocols. Crucially, the intervention participants will benefit from electricity saving strategies, fostering immediate effectiveness of the interventions in real-life contexts. This trial was preregistered in the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/9vtn4.

New network tariffs designed to recover grid operating costs can introduce up to a 500% increase in charges for some households. A transition from volumetric to peak-load-based tariffs will require targeted policy measures such as clear price signals, information about household electricity consumption and temporary compensation or mitigation mechanisms. Messages for policy New tariffs designed to support continued network charges in the face of increased electricity self-consumption should include cost transparency and set the right consumer incentives. The low predictability of tariffs based on peak charges and their potentially high financial impact may result in an increased number of consumer complaints. Procedures will need to be introduced to handle this. Impact of alternative tariffs on household budgets is largely dependent on the household’s economic status. Mitigation mechanisms to deal with hardship cases, at least during the transition phase, are required. Tariffs that combine measured peak demand and volumetric components can help manage increased self-consumption and rebalance the distribution of network costs across customers irrespective of their socioeconomic status.

With the ongoing efforts on the European level to promote energy efficiency, the need for the development of harmonised evaluation criteria for energy efficiency measures arises. Such criteria will allow extensive comparisons of the success or failure of the implementation of energy efficiency measures throughout Europe and will support the development of a first–best strategy for the realisation of energy savings targets in Europe. Two fundamental evaluation possibilities exist: bottom-up and top-down quantifications of energy savings. Bottom-up calculations give a more detailed view of the impact of energy efficiency measures but are much more costly and time consuming than top-down calculations. In our opinion, this effort can be reduced without losing precision in the savings calculations by the homogenisation of these energy efficiency measures. In this paper, we develop a framework specifying how such a homogenisation could look.

The Energy Service Directive (ESD) has pushed forward the issue of energy savings calculations without clarifying the methodological basis. Savings achieved in the Member States are calculated with rather non-transparent and hardly comparable Bottom-up (BU) methods. This paper develops the idea of parallel evaluation tracks separating the Member States? issue of ESD verification and comparable savings calculations. Comparability is ensured by developing a standardised BU calculation kernel for different energy efficiency improvement (EEI) actions which simultaneously depicts the different calculation options in a structured way (e.g. baseline definition, system boundaries, double counting). Due to the heterogeneity of BU calculations the approach requires a central database where Member States feed in input data on BU actions according to a predefined structure. The paper demonstrates the proposed approach including a concrete example of application. nema

How to choose the most appropriate economic instruments in environmental policy has been widely discussed within the OECD in the past two decades.¹ While market-based instruments are considered to be theoretically superior to command-and-control measures, the latter are still the dominant tools in environmental policy and the former a source of discussion about their distributional effects and influences on competitiveness.² While in the past, environmental policy was targeted at directly observable threats to the environment, the threats associated with climate change are much less tangible and their possible outcomes are hardly assignable to one emission source alone. International agreements aiming

How to choose the most appropriate economic instruments in environmental policy has been widely discussed within the OECD in the past two decades.¹ While market-based instruments are considered to be theoretically superior to command-and-control measures, the latter are still the dominant tools in environmental policy and the former a source of discussion about their distributional effects and influences on competitiveness.² While in the past, environmental policy was targeted at directly observable threats to the environment, the threats associated with climate change are much less tangible and their possible outcomes are hardly assignable to one emission source alone. International agreements aiming